Search Engine Journal

Lycos Anti-Spam “Make Love Not Spam” Service Launched

Lycos has apparently been the target of spam attacks following the release of their anti-spam deny of service campaign. The BlogBloke reports on this new happening in the anti-spam wars “It’s payback time! Lycos Europe is distributing (for free) a screensaver that targets verified spam servers. The program called ‘Make Love Not Spam’ sends a request to view a spam source site, and when a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam website will become overloaded and slow.”

“Lycos claims this is different than a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack because they conduct tests to make sure that no server actually stops working. Lycos believes the increased bandwidth usage caused by the program will eventually hurt spammers through higher bills.”

Lycos hopes that their new offensive against spam will make the spammers monthly bandwidth bill sky rocket, by keeping their servers running 24/7.

“We’ve never really solved the big problem of spam which is that its so damn cheap and easy to do,” said Malte Pollmann, spokesman for Lycos Europe.

“We’ve found a way to make it much higher cost for spammers by putting a load on their servers.”

The news on Lycos “Make Love Not Spam” Screensaver “Zombie Army” was followed by a hoax by spammers who announced that the Lycos program was hacked into. However, CNet reports that the attack on Lycos was all a hoax. Lycos said that an e-mail that contained an apparent mirror image of the Web site being hacked was a hoax generated by spammers.

“This is a hoax,” said Malte Pollmann, director of communication services for Lycos Europe. “We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers, we don’t have any logs of an attack. No one was able to verify that.”