What Is an Email Bomb? How to Protect Yourself from Email Bombs? - MiniTool

What is an email bomb? Email bombs are one type to perform denial-of-service (DoS) attack and bring much trouble in people’s work and life. Want to stop being the victim of email bombs? MiniTool Website will deliver a series of targeted measures.

What Is an Email Bomb?

What is an email bomb? When you suffer from an email bomb attack, you will receive large volumes of email messages. Those emails can overwhelm the server by performing a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. They can distract your attention from important email messages indicating a security breach.

As a result, your inbox and server will stop functioning on compromised systems and cyber attackers will seize the chance to perform fraudulent activities.

What Are the Different Kinds of Email Bomb Attacks?

Then, there are some different kinds of email bomb attacks that threat actors would like to perform.

Mass Mailing Attack

Threat actors can flood the victims with large amounts of emails to put you at risk of being flagged as spam and reduce your reach.

This attack is similar to DDoS flooding attacks. Millions of emails are addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood.

Attachment Attack

Different from mass mailing attacks, attachment attacks can send multiple messages containing large attachments. These can quickly eat up server storage space, slowing down server performance and stopping it from responding.

List Linking Attack

Under the list linking attack, the attackers can sign up for multiple email subscription services with your email address and your email inbox will be flooded with that information.

Since those messages are delivered from legitimate sources, this makes it more difficult to identify which information is what you need, and the message that indicates security issues could be ignored.

Zip Bomb Attack

A zip bomb attack, also named decompression bomb, is a malicious archive file, containing a lot of repeated data, to crash any program or system reading it.

This kind of attack – a malicious compressed file – can be put into your email address and when you open it, the email server will crash. For more information about zip bombs, you can refer to this post: What Is a Zip Bomb? How to Protect Your Data from Zip Bomb.

How to Protect Yourself from Email Bombs?

Faced with these cyber-attacks that are hard to prevent, we have collected some tips concluded by professionals to lower the risks caused by email bomb attacks. So, how to prevent email bombs?

1. Have a separate email for work and ensure you use your business email only in work-related conditions.
2. Secure all your email addresses with multi-factor authentication.
3. Don’t share your email as plain text online or on websites with inadequate security.
4. Follow the restrictions delivered by official sources used to help secure your account.
5. Use a bulk mail filter to stop non-approved subscription-based emails from landing in inboxes.
6. Use CAPTCHA to prevent bots from accessing your servers and inbox by extension.
7. Use Bulk Mail and Spam Filters to protect your account.
8. Keep email delivery software updated and patched at all times.

Protect Your Data via Backup

Email bombs can crash your email server and all the functions in it stop working. They can also submerge your important information in the inbox and mix them up with your original emails. Your messages can be lost in the flood of useless email subscriptions.

If, unfortunately, you are confronted with the zip bomb attack, which can cause programs, or even systems, to go overwhelmed and crash, all your data in the system may get lost.

In this way, back up your important data in advance. MiniTool ShadowMaker, as a backup expert, has many salient edges and attracts a bunch of fans. With its easy-to-use interface and quick operating process, you can back up your systems, files & folders, and partitions & disks in a short time.

Download and install the program to start your backup process.

Bottom Line:

It is not difficult to figure out what the email bomb is but if you want to completely guard against this attack, that seems harder. Cyber-attacks can infiltrate your system by grasping any potential chances. To minimize the possible dangers, preparing a backup plan is what you should do.

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