A Simple Framework

Pre-information age military battleeelds are based on the traditional land, sea, air, and space paradigm. Global internetworking is causal to the creation of a dangerously real 5th Dimension of Warfare-Cyberspace. This paper describes an Internet based assault, commonly referred to as e-mail spam, on the Langley AFB internetwork-ing infrastructure. We discuss the cyber-attack, a framework for defending against the attack, and the results of the campaign. The countermeasure was accomplished by running the MTA in a mode which accepts and queues SMTP mail; processes the messages with a rules-based lter; and then forwards mail after ltering. The ltering framework is simple and eeective for a large subset of e-mail bombs. The prototype lter scripts may be obtained from the authors.