Lycos Strikes Back At Spammers With DoS Screensaver
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Lycos Europe took the fight to the enemy Monday, by launching a screensaver that conducts a group denial-of-service (DoS) attack against sites selling products marketed via spam.
Dubbed "Make Love Not Spam," the screensaver requests pages from servers "verified to be spam advertising sites," said Lycos. When a large number of the screensavers send requests at the same time, the spam site bogs down.
Lycos said that the screensaver was designed so that it would never completely collapse a sit --tricky legal issues there--and was also meant to chew up bandwidth and drive up spammers' costs.
Lycos claimed that it had decreased the response time of some of the targeted sites by as much as 85 percent.
The screensaver can be downloaded from the Lycos Europe Web site.
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