Pacific Bell Internet Services grappled with an unprecedented load of spam for four days this week, leading to sporadic disruptions of email service to thousands of customers across California. The attack cost the regional telephone company roughly $500,000, an executive said.
When asked if the company had ever seen an attack of this magnitude before, Pacific Bell Internet Vice President Ruben Cota said "never to this degree."
But even as the Internet service provider (ISP) sifts through its logs of the incident today, anti-spam activists saw in the brownout a silver lining, in that it may offer momentum to an anti-spam bill recently introduced in the state.
The deluge began late Monday afternoon, when Pacific Bell received a large volume of incoming spam email from multiple sources, said Cota. The spam soon overwhelmed a system capacity that, as of Monday, could only handle 50,000 more users above and beyond the company's existing 170,000 customers.
Some customers checking their email during the resulting brownout received "message refused" alerts from their mail software, Cota said.
Meanwhile, other customers saw no interruption in service, and those that did were sometimes able to receive mail after successive attempts. He said he couldn't estimate the percentage of customers affected by the load.
"What happens is the machine runs out of processing space because you're flooding it with sometimes huge volumes of incoming mail," Cota said, explaining the effects of spamming.
"It runs out of processing space and can't keep up," Cota said. "Then you get another spam that slows it more and more - until at one point, it can collapse." In this case, the system never actually collapsed, Cota said, though he noted it has happened to ISPs in the past.
The ISP responded by moving to double its capacity to 440,000 users, which it did by Thursday evening, Cota said, installing four more mail gateways. The move cost the service close to $500,000, Cota estimated.
The spam messages were "varying messages [not all the same spam message] and did come from multiple sources externally," Cota said.
Pacific Bell Internet has dedicated four full-time employees to stay on top of spam problems. That team is spending today analyzing this week's onslaught to see if any special conditions or points of origin can be determined for the email.
Cota couldn't say whether it was simply a case of bad timing - converging multiple large spams arriving at once - or whether addresses at Pacific Bell Internet were specifically targeted by the spam. Cota said he knew of no other ISP experiencing a similarly massive mail overload at the same time.
The company will try to determine where the spams originated and then contact the originating ISPs to ask that they take action against the offending spammers. Cota said legal action against such spammers would be a possibility.
No email messages were actually lost in the incident, according to Cota, as gateways were able to deliver mail once normal capacity was resumed.
The incident shows that even those companies vigilant about fighting spam can fall victim. Anti-spam activists said that Pac Bell is a vocal participant in the anti-spam movement.
"They are one of the better [ISPs], generally speaking," said Scott Mueller, chairman of Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "[Pac Bell] participates in the anti-spam community; they are not one of the companies that sticks their head in the sand," Mueller said.
Mueller was suprised to hear of the email brownout, though, noting that Nick Nicholas, a Pac-Bell employee dedicated to dealing with bulk email, had been silent on the issue on a CAUCE mailing list.
Mueller and another CAUCE member were disturbed to learn of the attack, but also saw a potential silver lining: It could add political momentum to an anti-spam bill recently introducted in the California Assembly.
"I can't say I'm happy to hear that it happened, but then again, I can't complain about the timing," said John Mozena, vice-president of CAUCE.
On Wednesday, CAUCE endorsed the Internet Consumer Protection Act, Assembly Bill 1629. The bill would allow California companies affected by spam, such as Pac Bell, to sue spammers for $50 per message, up to a maximum of $15,000 per day in which the spamming takes place.
"I am sure that Pac Bell is going to lose customers to AOL or Compuserve because they are not able to provide their services," said John Cusey, a legislative aid to Assemblyman Gary Miller, the bill's author.
If AB 1629 becomes law, Cusey said, Pac Bell will have the opportunity to recoup some of the damages and, more importantly, send a message to spammers that their business is no longer as profitable as it might have been.
"Part of the reason [spammers] use such huge spam lists, and don't target them, is because if they can get a 2 percent return they are making money," said Cusey. "If they are going to get nailed with a $30,000 lawsuit, they will think twice," he said.
The bill will be heard by the state's Consumer Protection Committee on 31 March. Mozena said that the bill was the best legislative effort to date to address the spam problem.
"This is anti-spam legislation that could well bring on board some of the constituencies that have been vehemently opposed to anti-spam legislation in the past, and could negate the rabid anti-free speech activist [camp]."
