Subscribers to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security daily email bulletin <A HREF="http://www.cio.com/article/143551/U.S._Gov_t_E_Mail_Server_Turns_into_Spam_Cannon">were inundated with dozens of emails</A> on Wednesday due to a glitch with the mailing list. The gaffe started after one man, Alex Greene, a manager at GKN Freight Services, sent a reply to the Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, a round-up of security-related news reports, to change his subscription information.

The email server sent Greene's reply to everyone on the DHS's subscriber list, which sent off a torrent of responses from recipients--some humorous, some irritable--which in turn were fired out again to all subscribers, according to the SANS Institute, a computer security monitoring organization. The cause of the problem was likely an erroneous change in the email server's settings. The error could cause big trouble if a hacker sent a bad email attachment with a zero-day security vulnerability "to nail a few dozen gullible security professionals," Marcus Sachs wrote in the SANS diary, which documents security incidents.