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In a new take on fighting spam, Web portal Lycos Europe has launched a screensaver designed to bombard Web sites promoted in unsolicited e-mail.
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The effort, dubbed "Make love not spam," will officially launch on Wednesday and will center around the screensaver, which the company has designed to overload Web sites advertised via spam. Lycos Europe is a separate company from the Web portal that bears the Lycos name in the United States. Lycos Europe claims that it currently maintains roughly 40 million e-mail accounts across eight European countries.
Under the plan, when a URL already listed on Lycos Europe's spam blacklist is mentioned in e-mail sent to someone using the screensaver, the tool automatically and repeatedly requests data from the site in question. The idea is that when a large number of the screensavers send requests to the same page at the same time, those sites' performance will suffer greatly.
A graphic on the Lycos Europe site advertises the ability of its customers to "annoy a spammer now!"
Lycos Europe contends that the technology will create logistical problems for spammers. While the company said it does not intend to disable any site completely, it believes that it can overload sites based on the volume of spam created to advertise them. The company said the screensaver system uses an automated "health check" feature to ensure that its data requests never render any site completely inoperable.
- Realistic solutions to anti-spam
- It would be nice if we could attack spammers like this.
As a developer working on more realistic solutions to spam. More details from:
http://www.windeveloper.com/consult/consult.htm
I analyzed the content of a large number of spam emails and can guess what spammers will do. They will simply hide a number of urls within the mail of innocent companies together with the URL of the spammer's site. They can easily make these invisible. - Reply to this comment
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- Lycos's answer is realistic and powerful
- There is one point you miss : the URLs provided to the screensaver are all manually selected by peoples at Lycos who actually monitor both the amount of spamvertisement and the target websites content. Spammers can add as many links to ibm.com or microsoft.com in their spams as they want, humans sorting out the addresses will not put them in the list.
A more realistic response might be for the spammer to manipulate the DNS records of his domain to redirect the activity against his site toward an unrelated legitimate target. I don't know if this is already checked in the screensaver, but Lycos must check both the URL and the IP or they'll be in trouble soon.
If you're curious, here is the realtime data ...
http://backend.makelovenotspam.com/xml/
Raising spammer's cost and making it unprofitable is the way to go ! - View reply
- What they should really bombard
- What they should really be bombarded are the spammers' mail servers. Any machine identified as sending spam should be kept occupied doing something else. Open relays should be sent email that would make them forward email to each other or try to relay them to dead ends. This will occupy them at least part time and reduce the amount of spam they can deliver at the same time.
- Reply to this comment
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- Sorry won't work
- The spammers have already moved into the world of illegal activities by using PCs that were infected by viruses or trojans as the source point for their spamming activity. Flooding the source would cause the poor soul who's already lost control of their own PC even more grief.
The point Lycos is making here though is that in order for spam to be commercially effective the recipient of the spam must be able to contact the sender of the spam in order to transact business. By making it difficult to contact the spammer the spammer looses and by making it more expensive for the spammers due to bandwidth cost increases their profit is reduced to a point spamming is no longer profitable (at least it's hoped it will work that way).
- What they should really bombard
- What they should really be bombarded are the spammers' mail servers. Any machine identified as sending spam should be kept occupied doing something else. Open relays should be sent email that would make them forward email to each other or try to relay them to dead ends. This will occupy them at least part time and reduce the amount of spam they can deliver at the same time.
- Reply to this comment
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- Sorry won't work
- The spammers have already moved into the world of illegal activities by using PCs that were infected by viruses or trojans as the source point for their spamming activity. Flooding the source would cause the poor soul who's already lost control of their own PC even more grief.
The point Lycos is making here though is that in order for spam to be commercially effective the recipient of the spam must be able to contact the sender of the spam in order to transact business. By making it difficult to contact the spammer the spammer looses and by making it more expensive for the spammers due to bandwidth cost increases their profit is reduced to a point spamming is no longer profitable (at least it's hoped it will work that way).
- The Financial Side
- I find it very odd that so many people can complain about this possibly costing spammers and the companies that allow them to spam money being a problem. Wining that it isn't fair to cost them money. Working for one of the largest ISP's around don't you think it costs us money to just continue to filter it, receive it, store it, staff for it, and forward it to abuse addresses, etc. Being in the support industry we probably spend approximately 90% of our time fighting spam, spyware, and viruses. I think all the companies should just put up a Terms of Use saying we bill $$$ for receiving spam and send a bill to the companies that send out spam.
More power to them I have 4 systems that are online almost 24 hours a day so I'll make sure I do my part. I already report all spammers to SpamCop.com, uec@ftc.org, and the abuse services so whats another toy to play with. - Reply to this comment
- The Financial Side
- I find it very odd that so many people can complain about this possibly costing spammers and the companies that allow them to spam money being a problem. Wining that it isn't fair to cost them money. Working for one of the largest ISP's around don't you think it costs us money to just continue to filter it, receive it, store it, staff for it, and forward it to abuse addresses, etc. Being in the support industry we probably spend approximately 90% of our time fighting spam, spyware, and viruses. I think all the companies should just put up a Terms of Use saying we bill $$$ for receiving spam and send a bill to the companies that send out spam.
More power to them I have 4 systems that are online almost 24 hours a day so I'll make sure I do my part. I already report all spammers to SpamCop.com, uec@ftc.org, and the abuse services so whats another toy to play with. - Reply to this comment
- Use At Own Risk!! DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service
- This is a clear "opt-in" Distributed Denial of Service attack by one ISP against the hosted websites of another.
Not only is this illegal, it degrades the performance of the networks of participants. ISPs are alerady blocknig the website where the screensaver can be downloaded and where lists of targets are provided to stop the traffic being generated by it.
Each ISP has an obligation to their customers to prevent them from using DDoS tools while connected to their network. Your specific ISP may be able to recoup damages from it's customers in the form of extra fees and fines.
You use this screen saver at risk to your own finances. Not from the spammers but from the ISPs caught in the cross fire. - Reply to this comment
- Use At Own Risk!! DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service
- This is a clear "opt-in" Distributed Denial of Service attack by one ISP against the hosted websites of another.
Not only is this illegal, it degrades the performance of the networks of participants. ISPs are alerady blocknig the website where the screensaver can be downloaded and where lists of targets are provided to stop the traffic being generated by it.
Each ISP has an obligation to their customers to prevent them from using DDoS tools while connected to their network. Your specific ISP may be able to recoup damages from it's customers in the form of extra fees and fines.
You use this screen saver at risk to your own finances. Not from the spammers but from the ISPs caught in the cross fire. - Reply to this comment
- Lycos Europe: Employers of Script Kiddies
- Seems to me that Lycos Europe has picked up one of those virus writers who was looking for a new job. :)
- Reply to this comment
- Lycos Europe: Employers of Script Kiddies
- Seems to me that Lycos Europe has picked up one of those virus writers who was looking for a new job. :)
- Reply to this comment
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