Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb - Identifying List Bombing of End Users in an Email Anti-Spam Context

Learn to identify and combat list bombing attacks in email anti-spam systems through this 21-minute conference talk. Explore how attackers exploit legitimate marketing signup forms to flood users' inboxes with high volumes of non-malicious but unwanted emails, creating a new paradigm that traditional spam detection systems struggle to address. Discover the technical implementation process for detecting these attacks using modern data engineering tools, including reading and writing to Kafka, implementing Delta table streaming for ETL workflows, designing multi-table liquid clustering for efficient joins, curating gold tables to optimize critical queries, and leveraging Delta tables as auditable integration points with external services. Gain insights into how legitimate emails following best practices can still constitute an attack when weaponized at scale, and understand the data engineering solutions needed to identify patterns in anti-spam telemetry that reveal list bombing campaigns targeting end users.