Freeze on anti-spam campaign
Found on BBC News on Friday, 03 December 2004
A campaign by Lycos Europe to target spam-related websites appears to have been put on hold.
Earlier this week the company released a screensaver that bombarded the sites with data to try to bump up the running costs of the websites.
People were encouraged to download the screensaver which, when their PC was idle, would then send lots of data to sites that peddle the goods and services mentioned in spam messages.
Monitoring firm Netcraft analysed response times for some of the sites targeted by the screensaver and found that a number were completely knocked offline.
If only the spam websites would be hit, then I wouldn't have any problem with it. Spammers flood my mailbox with unwanted crap (that I don't even read), forcing me to use filters if I don't want to change my email address every month. The problem is that many websites are hosted on a single server, and if it goes down, so will innocent sites. That is the inacceptable problem. So there needs to be a different approach. Instead of dDoS'ing the site, the screensaver could simply fill out the order forms with bogus data. So, instead of sending millions of requests, just fill out a few thousand forms per day automatically and watch the spammers sit in front of huge useless order-lists.