Australian Federal Police have arrested a woman in Werrington, Sydney, for allegedly email bombing the office of a Federal MP.

Email bombing is an online attack where attackers bombard an email address with thousands of emails to overwhelm a recipient’s inbox or mail server.

AFP says the women sent more than 32,000 emails to the MP’s office in 24 hours, preventing employees from using computer systems and the public from contacting the office.

“Police will allege the woman used multiple domains to send 32,397 emails over a 24-hour period until her arrest, resulting in ongoing disruption and harassment,” explains the Australian Federal Police.

The alleged email bomber is to be charged with one count of committing unauthorized tampering with electronic communications, which violates section 477.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth).

The maximum prison term for this particular offense is ten years.

Although AFP does not specify the exact means by which the arrested woman sent a large number of emails to the MP’s office in such a short time, it does state that the attack used several domains during the attack. sending e-mails.

This likely means the arrested woman used an ‘e-mail bombing’ service which allows customers to send many emails to a target from different addresses, making it difficult for the recipient to contain and manage the atypical denial of service attack.

Many of these services can bypass the spam filters used today, filling employee inboxes and overwhelming the targeted organization’s mail server.

These email bombing services are usually offered on the dark web or in underground hacking forums and marketplaces, such as those featured below.

Alternatively, the attacker may have used scripts that automate the registration of the target’s email address on numerous websites, which then sent registration confirmations to the MP’s office. Since these sites are legitimate, their messages bypass spam filters.

Unfortunately, due to these attacks involving a large number of senders, blocking email addresses or marking their messages as spam is not a very effective method of defense.

The only way to deal with this type of threat is to implement an advanced filtering tool that will block messages based on specific criteria, such as keywords in the content.