Cyber Security Institute

Monday, December 06, 2004

Antispam campaign bites the dust

After a week of heavy criticism, Lycos Europe said on Friday that it has thrown in the towel on its plan to launch denial-of-service-like attacks on spammers.

In the statement, the company rapped the media, as well as Internet monitoring company Netcraft.  “We are astonished by the enormous resonance generated by the “Make love not spam” campaign,” the statement read.  “With this campaign we intended to raise a new impulse in the antispam discussion, and therefore create awareness for the big economic and societal problems caused by spam.  The campaign has reached its goal and thus will be stopped.”

The company forcefully denied it launched any denial-of-service attacks on spammers and that it had taken two Chinese Web sites offline.

The statement continued: “In opposition to media reports to the contrary, we did not attempt any denial-of-service.  We forcefully rebut a report by Netcraft referring to two spam servers having been disabled by our screensaver.”  At the point of time of the Netcraft measurement on December 1st, 2004, both spam servers were not on the target list of the screensaver.

Also, the screensaver’s website has not been hacked as reported by F-Secure.  “This has been acknowledged by F-Secure itself.”

This decision comes about a week after the “Make love not spam” screensaver was launched.  The tool was taken offline on Friday, but at the time Lycos claimed that the tool would soon be back online.  The downloadable screensaver uses the idle processing power of users’ computers to slow down bandwidth that connects to spammers’ Web sites.

“Things have changed,” said a Lycos UK representative on Monday.  He said that the company had reviewed “Make love not spam” before deciding not to bring it back.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5479582.html