Marshall Islands Telecom Works to Restore Normal E-mail Services

A cyber attack crippled incoming email service of the Marshall Islands' National Telecommunication Authority (NTA) yesterday. About midnight, traffic on NTA's incoming mail gateways peaked above four times their normal levels. On Tuesday, users were not receiving e-mail messages, nor SPAM. The outgoing e-mail service was not affected.

By Wednesday afternoon, NTA General Manager Anthony Muller said that e-mail appeared to be flowing normally. "Our technical team has put in place measures and filters to tame this attack."

In a response to Yokwe Online via email, Muller said NTA's IT department indicated that this higher than normal level of traffic was created as each of the incoming mail gateways were subjected to over 500 SMTP connections per second.

"These unusually high numbers of connections did not actually deliver email messages as the mail queues on our incoming mail gateways remained empty. This is quite different from the normal SPAM attacks we see daily; SPAM actually tries to flood our queues with email messages, however, this attack was designed to keep our servers constantly locked to zombies, while blocking legitimate e-mail."

The attack was consistent with an incoming e-mail Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) using spoofed IP addresses.

"We will continue to monitor and add resources as necessary to return e-mail services to normal," said Muller.

- Aenet Rowa, Yokwe Online, June 25, 2008