Adversaries may flood targeted email addresses with an overwhelming volume of messages. This may bury legitimate emails in a flood of spam and disrupt business operations.(Citation: sophos-bombing)(Citation: krebs-email-bombing)
An adversary may accomplish email bombing by leveraging an automated bot to register a targeted address for e-mail lists that do not validate new signups, such as online newsletters. The result can be a wave of thousands of e-mails that effectively overloads the victim’s inbox.(Citation: krebs-email-bombing)(Citation: hhs-email-bombing)
By sending hundreds or thousands of e-mails in quick succession, adversaries may successfully divert attention away from and bury legitimate messages including security alerts, daily business processes like help desk tickets and client correspondence, or ongoing scams.(Citation: hhs-email-bombing) This behavior can also be used as a tool of harassment.(Citation: krebs-email-bombing)
This behavior may be a precursor for Spearphishing Voice. For example, an adversary may email bomb a target and then follow up with a phone call to fraudulently offer assistance. This social engineering may lead to the use of Remote Access Software to steal credentials, deploy ransomware, conduct Financial Theft(Citation: sophos-bombing), or engage in other malicious activity.(Citation: rapid7-email-bombing)
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CIS-18.3 | Remediate Penetration Test Findings | mitigates | T1667 | Email Bombing |
Comments
This relationship applies when penetration testing identifies the described software configuration weakness and remediation of the finding strengthens mail service configuration, sender authentication policy, filtering, throttling, and related controls that reduce abusive high-volume email delivery.
References
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| CIS-9.5 | Implement DMARC | mitigates | T1667 | Email Bombing |
Comments
ATT&CK explicitly discusses DMARC, SPF, and DKIM on the Email bombing technique page, including how enabling these mechanisms within an organization (through policies such as DMARC) may enable recipients (intra-org and cross domain) to perform similar message filtering and validation to mitigate this technique.
References
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| action.hacking.variety.DoS | Denial of service | related-to | T1667 | Email Bombing |