Lycos anti-spam weapon dropped

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Lycos anti-spam campaign bites the dust

Lycos anti-spam weapon melts away

Update: After days of negative publicity and criticism, the

'Make love not spam' application is no longer available. Lycos

says it's just been too popular, and promises it will be back

The zombie army created by a Lycos screensaver to attack

spammers' Web sites has been dismantled.

The controversial attempt to attack spammers by bombarding their web sites with traffic from thousands of individual PCs is over.

After a week of heavy criticism of the company's plan to launch denial-of-service-like attacks on spammers, Lycos has thrown in the towel, lashing out at the media and Internet monitoring company NetCraft.

In a statement from the company said: "We are astonished by the enormous resonance generated by the "Make Love No Spam" campaign. 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 took 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 just a week after "Make Love Not Spam" was launched. The tool was taken offline last Friday, but at the time Lycos claimed that the tool would soon be back online.

"Things have changed," said a UK spokesman on Monday. He said that Lycos had reviewed "Make Love Not Spam" before deciding not to bring it back.

Lycos won huge amounts of publicity from its anti-spam tool, but also attracted a storm of criticism from experts claiming the scheme was poorly thought out and a bad idea overall.

Although the campaign was short lived, legal experts believe that the plan highlighted holes in UK laws. Earlier this year, the All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that parliament made it an offence to impair access to data as part of an upheaval of the Computer Misuse Act (1990). But as it stands companies may have trouble in prosecuting anyone who starts DDoS attacks.

"The Lycos thing has shown a lack of ability [in the law]to prosecute for denial-of-service attacks," said Mark Smith, solicitor for Olswang. "You would struggle under current laws to bring a case against someone. The problem is that DDoS attacks cross jurisdictions."

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But there has been some amount of success in its objective.

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Lycos zombie army takes Web sites offline

Web traffic monitor Netcraft has found that Lycos's 'Make love

not spam' campaign has taken some of its target Web sites offline.

Web portal company Lycos's 'Make love not spam' campaign has killed access to some of the Web sites of its target spammers as the result of denial-of-service attacks.

According to Internet traffic monitoring company Netcraft, Lycos successfully took offline two Web sites hosted in China, bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz.

Netcraft's Web site said: "A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available."

Lycos was unavailable for comment on the matter, but said yesterday it was not carrying out DDoS attacks, just slowing the bandwidth of its targets. It added it had no intention of taking Web sites offline.

"I have to be very clear that it's not a denial-of-service attack," said Malte Pollmann, director of communication services for Lycos. "We slow the remaining bandwidth to 5 percent. It wouldn't be in our interests to [carry out DoS attacks]. It is to increase the cost of spamming. We have an interest to make this, economically, unattractive."

Yesterday, Lycos denied claims that it was hit by hacker attacks, but several reports, including one from Netcraft, have alleged that the 'Make love not spam' Web site was unavailable at several intervals. There is, however, no conclusive evidence either way on whether the defacement was a hoax or not.

Lycos launched its campaign earlier this week, offering users a screensaver that uses idle processing power of their computers to slow down bandwidth that connects to spammer's Web sites.

Head of international spam fighting organisation Spamhaus Steve Linford said that by attacking spammer's bandwidth, Lycos could be attacking innocent users' bandwidth.