At a recent Association for Computing Machinery conference on privacy in an electronic society, the researchers -- including a Johns Hopkins faculty member -- described how automated order forms on the Web could be exploited to send tens of thousands of unwanted catalogs to a business or an individual. Such an onslaught would not only pose problems for the victim, but it could also paralyze the local post office charged with making such deliveries, the researchers suggested. After explaining how such attacks could take place, the researchers proposed several technological "fixes" that could help prevent them.

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has enabled many merchants, government agencies and non-profit organizations to make sales catalogs and information packets available to anyone who can fill out a simple on-line form. But these forms, the researchers say, have also opened a gateway that could allow disruptive activity to spill out of cyberspace. "People have not considered how easily someone could leverage the scale and automation of the Internet to inflict damage on real-world processes," said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at The Johns Hopkins University and one of the authors of the paper.


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