
British NHS DDOS attacks itself via email sent to 1.2M staff - stuartbman
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/14/nhs-it-blunder-sees-system-clogged-after-email-sent-to-12-millio/
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misframer
Reminds me of the "Bedlam DL3" story from Microsoft [0].

[0]
[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-
too/)

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0xmohit
Somewhat odd that in setups this large emails to all are unregulated. I'd
expect those to go through some "approval" channel.

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eggie5
This happened at Qualcomm once. Some IT email was sent out to most of the corp
and then people's vacation/out-of-office auto-reply-to-all propagated it more.
Then people would send reply-all messages like "remove me from this list!" it
went on for most of the day.

~~~
dudus
Also happened at IBM when I worked there. A guy named Armando changed his
phone and manage to send a notice to everyone in the company using a maillist.
People didn't know about the maillist and started to ask to be removed, turns
out it was not possible... It took weeks to solve and everyone at IBM pretty
much lost access to email during the period due to the overload. Even worse,
at the time a lot of internal systems at IBM were based in Lotus Notes that is
a weird framework email client mashup and those systems were also affected.

This happened in 2007

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astrodust
Can _anyone_ explain why people leave their servers configured to allow
arbitrarily long To: lists? Any large organization is just one mistake away
from a Reply-All apocalypse.

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bcraven
This may be a mailing list, rather than a simple 'Reply-All' thing (and the
media have misunderstood). The reply box will be a single address if that's
the case.

~~~
astrodust
If so, there's ways of limiting who can address that address and in so doing
spam the entire company.

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mhays
This is not a ddos attack. More like ddos mistake or accident.

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ljf
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950830)

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rcarmo
This is reminiscent of at least one IT Crowd episode (I forget the title), and
so typical...

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johansch
Two stories about this topic on the front-page right now. Merge them?

