Uunet knocked out by spam attack

Hundreds of thousands of Uunet's internet customers have been left without email services since Thursday after the company's Pipex Dial mail servers were brought down by concerted commercial spam attacks.

Michael Stone, IT director at online aerospace and defence journal Defence Data, complained after Pipex Dial could not tell him when his email services would be restored.

"I have been on the phone to Uunet four or five times to get my rag off," Stone said. "This is completely unacceptable, as we rely on our email. I was told that someone had intruded into their systems. It must go beyond queueing problems, because we would have had the backlog by now."

However, Uunet spokesman Richard Woods told vnunet.com that the outage began on Thursday when the company's systems were targeted with huge volumes of commercial spam containing very long cc lists.

"There are hundreds of thousands of customers affected," Woods admitted. "We were hit by a very big commercial mailing that clogged up our mail servers on Thursday. We identified the source, as it came in several times from a series of dynamic IP addresses in Canada."

"It was not an offensive mail, but spam trying to get a free ride on our system. We don't think it was designed as a denial of service attack."

Uunet said it currently has three engineers per mail server picking out the spam headers. However, the company anticipates it will not be able to restore full mail services before Monday.

"This has had a fairly significant impact. But we've mobilised the troops and I apologise to all our customers," said Woods.