Lycos Fightback
Is the Lycos Fightback a distributed denial of service attack or not?
Either way, it looks like Lycos have suspended their attempt to hassle the spammers for now, perhaps for fear of retaliation against users.
The idea went as follows
- Spammers send these daft e-mails to encourage you to visit their idiotic Web sites selling enhancement products you are not interested in
- Lycos customers could download some screensaver software that would use spare time to upload data to the offending Web sites
- Lycos carefully monitored loading to keep the capacity under 95% so they were not doing a direct denial of service attack on the sites
Problems resulted from the different legislation in various countries. Denial of service attacks are being made an offence in a number of countries including the UK if the All Party Internet Group’s recommendations are put into practice. Lycos may fall foul of any legislation that is already on the books.