The Hypocrisy Weblog

As mentioned earlier here at Hypocrisy.nu, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Lycos Europe has been having trouble with their anti-spam campaign “Make love not spam“, and now the the campaign is scrapped.

Through the Make Love, Not Spam website, users could download a screensaver that would endlessly request data from the net sites mentioned in many junk mail messages.

More than 100,000 people are thought to have downloaded the screensaver that Lycos Europe offered.

Lycos so far maintains that it has been careful to avoid completely shutting down the sites it targets as such distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are considered illegal in many European countries and the US, but monitoring firm Netcraft claims that some of the sites that the screensaver targeted were being knocked offline by the constant data requests.

In a statement from Lycos Europe announcing the scrapping of the scheme, the company denied that this was its fault.

“There is nothing to suggest that Make Love, Not Spam has brought down any of the sites that it has targeted,” the statement read.

“At the time that Netcraft measured the sites it claims may have been brought down, they were not in fact part of the Make Love, Not Spam attack cycle.”.

The statement issued by Lycos also said that the centralised database it used ensured that traffic to the target sites left them with 5% spare capacity.

“The idea was simply to slow spammers’ sites and this was achieved by the campaign.”.

(Note that many security organisations said users should not participate in the Lycos Europe campaign.)

Lycos has also shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both hosted by Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site.

The IP transfer is almost certainly the result of spammers redirecting traffic back to www.makelovenotspam.com, which means Lycos unintentionally launches a denial-of-service attack against it’s own anti-spam campaign web site.

To prevent further attacks by users, several major internet backbone providers and ISP’s are now blocking access to the Lycos web site, including Global Crossing’s worldwide network.

My comment; I hope that other ISPs will learn from this grand failure of Lycos Europe. From the first time the campaign risen in Sweden, the debate was on in the Internet community here. Of course there will always be the vigilante characters that wants “revenge” on the ones pestering their inboxes, email-servers and networks, but this is not the way to go. The only way is to create a framework, where serious actors on the Internet-market can exchange email-traffic.

Until this is done, server-side solutions such as Spam Assassin and server-side blacklist systems such as ORDB and Spamcop have to protect both providers and individual users. The previous mentioned together with open source antivirus software, such as ClamAV will both limit the amount of spam and viruses reaching individual users, and these software solutions will narrow down the target-range of those seeking new PCs to enslave in bot-networks used to spread further spam and viruses. The approach has an accumulative to narrowing down unwanted traffic on the worldwide network, known as the Internet.

Tags: PR

Technorati Tags: PR