[Technical] Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attack business

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>
Date: November 29, 2004 9:56:33 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attack business

        Lycos screensaver to blitz spam servers
        http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/lycos_europe_spam_blitz/

reads in part:

        "Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver
        in a controversial bid to battle spam. The program - titled
        Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS -
        sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number
        of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam
        web page becomes overloaded and slow."

        [...]

        "A spokesman for Lycos in Germany told The Register he
        believed that the tool could generate 3.4MB in traffic on a
        daily basis. When 10m screensavers are downloaded and used, the
        numbers quickly add up, to 33TB of 'useless' IP traffic"

It's hard to know where to even begin trying to explain how terribly
misguided this is, so I'll just confine myself to noting that trying
to win a bandwidth contest with spammers -- who have an unlimited supply
of it at zero cost -- reflects a stunning ignorance of reality.

---Rsk

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