Lycos launches anti-spam zombie army
Summary: Lycos is nurturing its own zombie army in a bid to bring down the world's most notorious spammers - with a screensaver called 'Make love not spam'
Lycos is offering its customers a screensaver that helps to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on spammers' Web sites.
The controversial move is designed to use the idle processing power of a computer to slow down the response times from spammers' Web sites.
"Lycos has been trying to position itself in the fight against spam," said Wessel Van Rensburg, product manager of communications for Lycos. "It launches tonight in the UK. It aims to use our community to fight spam. It uses idle computer power and sends requests to spam sites."
On its Web site, Lycos, which claims to have an army of more than 66,000 computers, says it has already attacked several Web sites, slowing one down by 85 percent of its operating speed. The software is open to Windows and Mac users.
The company said that when the screensaver is active it displays the location and URL of the sites users' PCs are attacking, and that Lycos decides the Web sites it will attack.
A spokesman for the company said: "This gives Internet users the opportunity to hit spammers where it hurts. Sending spam is not a minor misdemeanour, as spam causes billions of pounds of damage to the economy. This is why we are upping the ante in the fight against those responsible for spam."
But DDoS attacks are illegal in a many countries and some organisations have criticised the move. Steve Linford, director of non-profit anti-spam organisation Spamhaus, has dedicated the last eight years of his life to fighting spammers. He said that Lycos has failed to think the idea through.
"It's irresponsible of Lycos to put its name to it because it lends legitimacy to [DDoS] attacks," said Linford. "You can't break into a thief's house just because he breaks into yours. We don't support this or recommend this practice. Directing traffic is part of the degradation of the Internet we are trying to stop."
On its Web log, security company F-Secure also warned users away from the idea.
In its 'make love not spam' campaign, Lycos entices users to join the zombie army with the following message:
"Are you sick of getting unwanted messages in your inbox? Here's your chance to join the fight against spam as now you too can get involved. Download the Make Love not Spam screensaver - the only screensaver that actively works to stop the spammers - and tell your friends to do the same to spread the love."
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Talkback
It's better to make them 'unwelcome' in their ISP/Host, than to degrade the connection of the host which could affect legitimate customers.
It would be better to construct a program which submits spam to internet abuse sites so they can use 'proper' methods to put an end to them.
Personally I can't wait for SMTP to be re-designed so spammers can't send things anonymously or through forgeries.
Installed the screen saver three days ago and it worked fantastically with global statistisics and a world map showing where geographically the individual site requests were directed.
After the first day the link to the main server failed to connect. I went to the web site and it appeared to have a hacked message. It seems the spammers may have taken revenge on the site. I guess this is temporary and will soon be fixed.
'Zombie Army' appears an appropriate term as there seems to be a big battles occuring on the net behind the scenes involving terabytes of data and increasing army of antispammers using this screen saver (60,000 worldwilde and growing fast). I hope the anti-spammers triumph and the spammers find something more productive to do with thier time and energy.
This really is a STUPID idea.
This S/W is an excellent idea.
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Unfortunately, I have read several comments along the lines of 'two wrongs don't make a right.' Well, that is hog-wash!
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If someone is attacking you, you must fight back. It isn't wrong to defend yourself.
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It may be illegal or unpopular to defend yourself, but is completely MORAL.
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Let the fools & passivists lay down and take a beating.
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I'm fighting back!
What are you going to do?
Even a half decent web programmer can program data miners into a web page or site them at certain locations on a server.
By mass hitting these spam sites you may actually be sending your details unwitingly to a spammer who has not yet spammed you.
By using the target sites as mere data pickups the vast lists generated of mined data from these attacks can be sent to another server who can then start to spam on a seperate and unattacked subscriber line.
If the zombie army was 66,000,000 instead of 66,000 then you might get somewhere but 66,000 subscribers relates to about 5,000 users at any one time not using their computers and so attacking the spammers, assuming that there are 100 spammer servers on the list this relates to a total attack of 50 users at any one time one any one spammer server.
Now sorry guys but 50 hits a time is not going to phase a spammers servers.
Of course after spammers are in prison I personally would like to see if they want to start offering "massive growth and extra inches" etc to their <cough> cellmates.....
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