The Hypocrisy Weblog

Lycos now claims that the supposed hack of their “Make love not Spam“-campaign was a hoax created by some spammers themselves in order to taint the campaign.

“This is a hoax,” said Malte Pollmann, director of communication services for Lycos. “We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers we don’t have any logs of an attack. No one was able to verify that. I wouldn’t be surprised if [the screensaver] causes this in the future. We have a couple of port scans, but that’s normal.”

The campaign site is still inaccessible, and this doesn’t really give Lycos wind in their sails.

Even if this defacement was a hoax, the spammers sure manage in their task when it comes to creating negative PR connected to Lycos and their campaign.

To go deeper into the questionable behaviour of this campaign, I quote the article on ZDnet further;

Lycos launched its ‘make love not spam’ campaign, which offers users a screensaver that helps to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on spammers’ Web sites, on Monday. The company said the screensaver uses the idle processing power of a computer to slow down the response times from spammers’ Web sites — much in the same way spammers use compromised PCs to distribute unsolicited email messages.

But Lycos also denied it was using denial-of-service attacks.

“I have to be very clear that it’s not a denial-of-service attack,” said Pollmann. “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, not more attractive.”

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

But Pollmann sidestepped the question of doing this: “We want to hit targeted bandwidth. We are selecting spammers form blacklists. We verify every address. Professional spammers run on very dedicated media.

I think this quote sums it up very well;
“Not only is Lycos in danger of breaking laws, it is in danger of lending credibility to the notion that DDoS attacks are OK if you’re the good guy — which of course you are — and you’re launching it against someone who, well, just deserves it. Regardless of the semantics of whether what Lycos is doing really is a denial-of-service attack, when you attack the bandwidth of one computer on the Internet, you effectively attack the bandwidth of all computers.”

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