Email bombing falls under the category of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in the cyber attack spectrum. It involves sending a massive volume of emails to a target inbox or email server with the intent to overwhelm its capacity, causing disruption or complete inaccessibility.
Email bombing is a type of volumetric attack that floods the target's email system, consuming storage space, bandwidth, and processing power. This can lead to legitimate emails being blocked, server crashes, or service degradation.
An attacker uses automated scripts to send thousands of emails per second to a company's customer support inbox, causing the mailbox to exceed its quota and preventing genuine customer queries from being received.
To defend against email bombing, organizations can implement email filtering, rate limiting, and traffic analysis. Tencent Cloud Email Security (SES) provides advanced protection by detecting and blocking malicious email patterns, while Tencent Cloud Anti-DDoS helps mitigate large-scale traffic floods targeting email servers. Additionally, Tencent Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) can filter abusive traffic before it reaches the email infrastructure.