[From WSU Computing & Information Technology – July 18, 2007 - 2 p.m.]
C&IT staff have blocked the flood of outside junk mail to the university's central e-mail servers and are monitoring the WSU E-mail System to avert renewed attacks on it.
E-mail will continue to be slow throughout the day and into the evening as the system continues to process thousands of e-mail messages. As of 2 p.m. today, over 130,000 messages still await processing. We do expect WSU E-mail service to return to normal by Thursday morning, July 19.
E-mail messages that WSU students, faculty, and staff have sent do not need to be sent again. These will be delivered as the e-mail queue is processed.
This denial of service attack is a new kind of malevolent attempt to make a computing resource unavailable. Spammers used thousands of different addresses overseas and across the United States to originate messages, thereby making themselves look legitimate to our many e-mail defenses. C&IT is exploring a variety of ways to combat any future attacks like this.