Lycos screensaver starts trying to create traffic spike on spammer’s webservers
Lycos Europe just released a
screensaver that creates traffic to the webservers of spammers: “Make Love not Spam“. So is
this a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, or a good method to
deal with spammers? It will cost those websites money, yes so on the
first glance it sounds like a good idea.
However the spammers might very well start suing Lycos for the cost it
creates for them. After all initiating a DDoS is anything but legal in
most countries.
I will check into this a bit further, because it also seems it
partially comes down to how Lycos actually picks the sites. Let’s say
some affiliate of a major site just ends up spamming, and the Lycos
screensaver generates a lot of traffic to his site. He did not initiate
the spam nor really permit the spammer to use his affiliate link. So
the affiliate ID would be disabled, but would Lycos also remove that
site from their list?
[Update] So it turns out they are actually using the Spamcop
list to pick their targets. They are also just sending a get request,
but actually not waiting to receive a response. They also say that the
will distribute the requests in such a way that they will not bring
down the entire server, by some ‘health check’ they implemented. The Lycos website also shows a percentage by how much certain webservers are slowed down by the screensaver.