Monday, November 29, 2004
Village of the Spammed II : Revenge
[From Raja Reddy] The BBC reports about a screen-saver from Lycos, due December 1, that strikes back at spammers by overloading their servers. This is a flavor of the traditional denial-of-service attacks, wherein the intention is not to actually deny service, but to simply cause increased bandwidth bills.
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.
Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
...
[Malte Pollmann] said the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web.
...
The screensaver is due to be launched across Europe on 1 December and before now has only been trialled in Sweden.
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.
Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
...
[Malte Pollmann] said the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web.
...
The screensaver is due to be launched across Europe on 1 December and before now has only been trialled in Sweden.
