A-Infos (en)[n5m3-debates] Cyber Attack on Zapatista email community Foiled

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Sender  chiapas-l@burn.ucsd.edu
>From  Marilyn Davis <marilyn@deliberate.com>
The Zapatista email community has been being attacked the last few
days.  Many of our addresses have been rendered useless by fraudulent
subscriptions to hundreds of email lists around the world.  This also
has brought big problems to hundreds of unrelated email lists.  A most
inelegant attack!

Yesterday the online Consulta voting mechanism was also attacked in
this way and in other ways.  We had mailing loops going with majordomo
servers all over the world.  It brought down our machine ... but not
for long and all messages just waited at the host until we came back
online.

In response, we have invented an intelligent filter that seems to be
able to respond appropriately to the attacks.  As a result, the voting
mechanism is now going strong and taking votes.  I think we didn't
lose a vote or a message through the attacks.

This filter idea works so well that we have attached it to all our
lists at deliberate.com, making the Zapatista Online work secure as
well.

Our new address for the online consulta, zzzapa@deliberate.com will
probably be our last new address because it too is secure against this
kind of attack.

Most happily we are now able to offer Zapatistas secure addresses
here -- sort of an "email firewall address".  Here's how it works.

If you have a secret address, and you trust us, we can make a public
address for you:

Your_name@deliberate.com

Messages sent to that address will go through the filter and then on
to your secret address.  If the filter detects an attack, it will not
send you the message but will squelch the attack instead.

If you send a message from your secret address to
Your_name@deliberate.com, the software expects that the first word in
the message should be the real destination for the message.  Our
software forwards your message, making it look like it comes from
Your_name@deliberate.com (which it does) and hides your secret address
from your recipient.

So far, our machine is humming along.  We run on a shoestring:
hand-me-down Pentium, free linux, and beta-testing eVote, all working
through a little 33.6 connection so it is possible to bog us down if
there are too many requests.  However, we were very impressed with the
sturdiness of our system under attack and feel we can take a lot more
activity.  So please, let's stress our system and test our software.

First of all, please get people to vote online:

http://www.deliberate.com/consulta/
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~jjjacq/consulta/
http://www.keris.org/consulta/

Second, if you need a secure address, write to zzzapa@deliberate.com.

Let's not let them drive us into hiding and secrecy.

Hurray for our side!

Marilyn Davis

p.s. We are grateful to our attackers for pointing out our weakness,
for advertising our cause, and for bringing shame to our enemies.


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