Lycos Declares War on Spam Servers

Psychotext writes "The Register have posted a story about a new screensaver from Lycos that targets known spam servers (taken from spamcop and verified by hand) with traffic in order to raise their bandwidth costs and hopefully price them out of the game. Lycos state that this is not a DDOS as Lycos monitors the site's responsiveness and throttles back when the site starts to falter. The screensaver is available here for Mac OSX, Mac OS9 and Windows, though you might need to lie about what country you are from." Reader JohnGrahamCumming writes "As part of preparing for the MIT Spam Conference I've put together a survey on what people are experiencing out there with spam, what they are doing about and followed it up with a test of different views of an inbox filled with spam and ham. You can take the test and be part of the survey results in January."

Comments

Re:LAW SUIT

[JWSmythe]

Ya, but aparently the Lycos idea is to fill up their line with something, anything, to run the bandwidth bill up. ICMP, HTTP, whatever, as long as it fills the line.

Ok, do something like `cat /dev/zero | netcat [spammerip] 25`

And to the spamadvertised sites

`cat /dev/zero | netcat [spammerip] 80`

You could get more creative. You could find the form that allows a post, and form a script that tries to do a upload over POST, and effectively do the same thing.

(not that I'm giving hacking lessons or anything)

The creativity of how you'd do it is up to you. But my entire thought is, what goes around, comes around. If you guys start doing this, they'll start doing it back. Or someone else will thing you're a spammer and hit you.

We've received SpamCop complaints before. They're really great folks, I like their policies. 100% of our complaints have either been replies to billing queries, where a real human answered a real human's question, or it was an automated message spawned by the user (password retrevial, usually). We point it out, case closed.

The best one I've seen is where someone ordered something online, the billing person emailed saying something to the effect "Your credit card was declined, would you like to cancel the order or provide another form of payment". They sent it straight off to SpamCop. I got with the billing person, they showed me the order, we sent this back to SpamCop, and got an apology from the lady. She makes it a habit of reporting everything in her box as spam.

It's people like that who ruin the whole attempt at an anti-spam system.