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Lycos Anti-Spam Site Compromised [Updated]
An anonymous reader writes "Lycos, shortly after producing a screen saver to fight spammers using a DoS-style attack appears to have been hacked. Attempting to download the screen saver from lycos results in this message 'Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn't be doing it. Your ip address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.' Or maybe it's just a joke -- can you ever tell?" Update: 12/01 15:07 GMT by T : According to Lycos, the defacement reports were actually just a hoax.
If there are only a few large spamming... erm... entities, then I wonder how and when they'll finally be caught.
They wouldn't let phone telemarketers threaten you into buying whatever product. Aww, let's all feel sorry for the poor spammers. Boo hoo hoo.
----
Ground Control to Major Tom...
The Lycos screensaver has gotten a lot of press, and could certainly put a crimp in the spammers pocketbooks, and spammers aren't honest, so why wouldn't they hack Lycos?
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Clearly it must be a joke, since a Lycos rep is quoted as saying: "There's a risk we will receive some denial of service attacks in the next few days but we are ready."
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
Lycos, shortly after producing a screen saver to fight spammers using a DoS-style attack appears to have been hacked. ....and now totally slashdotted off the map to boot.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The way to "fight" spammers is by following the law and litigating against them. Childish things like using illegal hacking tools just puts gasoline on an already out of control blaze. More stringent laws and serious punishments for spammers is the final key to doing away with the vast numbers of spammers.
The "technological" solution to spam has shown itself to be totally ineffective. The solution which has worked to not only put a small dent in the daily dose of spam but also enrich the general public has been to take the spammers to court and eventually to jail when necessary.
Spam is like selling kids crack cocaine. No one wants that kind of shit in the neighborhood, but the only people willing to "take back the streets" are ninnies and other gang members.
Yes, hacking websites is wrong, you know this, you shouldn't be doing it. Your ip address and your actions have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.
Lad Vampire is still going strong. It's similar to the Lycos thing but only targets 419 scammers.
Someone was worried.
...if you're remotely surprised that this happened.
...
...
...
Yeah, didn't think so.
If something like this is ever going to work, it's going to have to be a lot more underground, just like the spammers.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
If anyone is interested, this link still works:
/ MLNS_screensaver_en.exe
http://download2.makelovenotspam.com/screensavers
Not only because the command-and-control server can be hacked and the hosts running the screensaver turned into a botnet used to launch DDoS attacks, as we see - but because a) the veracity of the so-called 'target list' cannot be verified to the degree necessary to make this even theoretically sensible (i.e., it could be gamed by those submitting false spam reports to induce the system to attack innocents, not to mention the PCs of innocents which have been compromised as spam-proxies along with the network infrastructures of their ISPs), but outbound DDoS can be just as devastating as inbound DDoS.
This is the stupidest idea ever. I hope several someones end up suing Lycos over this, it's just moronic.
-All- security measures should be predicated upon the sentiment expressed in Hippocrates' _Epidemics_ (-not- the Oath, that's a popular misconception) - '. . . first, do no harm'.
Report me? haha. Knowing my ISP, they'd probably increase my bandwidth.
I hope the guys who attacked Lycos are getting hit hard by their service. Keep it up Lycos! You're obviously hitting a nerve.
WTF... i can't tell if it's slashdot attacking these links or the spammers screwing them up. i guess we'll never know
This kind of tactic, if not outright illegal, is a grey area...now perhaps, if you simply made a script to go through the emails, put every link on a list, and used spare bandwidth to request pages from all of the links that have been sent, that could be legal, but still a grey area.
What I don't think is a good idea is a company deciding who deserves to be DDoSed. In that sense, it is little better than MyDoom, which also attacked unpopular companies.
Personally, I think we should try to take down companies that use spam for advertising legally, rather than using a DDoS. But I might not have the popular view, you never know.
So, what happens when Lycos points their DNS servers right back at them? Maybe it would create a cyber time-space vortex that would suck websites back into the past? ;) An internet wormhole of sorts...
Ok, time to turn off DS9 and get back to hw...
I'm amazed that Lycos thinks this will actually work, simply from the fact that I do not know anyone that has downloaded a "screen saver" for their computer in the last year.
It used to be all the rage... yes, starting with AfterDark decades ago, and finally culminating in WebShots a few years ago. But does anyone really do this nowadays? Seriously?
Maybe if it showed a random "babe/hunk of the day" while doing its nasty work it would be downloaded by more people...
I hate spam as much as the next person, but I'm having serious doubts about this project. How easy might it be to target this system to a legitimate website and turn the thing into a botnet for DDoS-attacks, and stuff like that?
The problem with spammers is a hopelessly outdated protocol for sending and relaying e-mail on the one hand, and on the other, governments failing to produce adequate legislation to combat spammers, scammers, and the like on the Internet.
Then think that most companies and business-oriented lobby groups fight hard to keep e-mail available as a direct marketing medium, the same way they would thoroughly object to a ban on telephone-based telemarketing.
We don't need a bunch of cowboys arming themselves with guns and taking out everyone they see as a danger to society/Internet, we need decent, solid legislation, and government commitment to take out spammers.
I downloaded the installer on 11/26 when the first /. article came out and the MD5 sum of that file was: 237ee99dc7f35d2e2c0a8640086167bf
And hacking websites that attack spammers is fine.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
At 3:06 am you downloaded AN EXE file.
Do you know for sure it is the one you think it is?
Do you know for sure what your system is doing?
If the site had been compromised, how do you know that file is the one which was originally hosted there?
Attack those spammers! Someone needs to stand up to them!
Spam is a huge amount of traffic on the net, that is my problem with it. Turning clueless lycos users into antispambots will not DECREASE the traffic on the net but increase it. Also, if joe blow user gets a screen saver that DDOSs a.b.c.d and said spammer goes out of business resulting in cox cable giving my grandma a cable modem at a.b.c.d do you really think J Blow user is going to know to get his screensaver updated or are a large chunk of them going to run the initial screensaver as long as they ran Win 98 unpatched (forever)
You know what, I'm sick of pirates. Actual sea pirates. I think we should ship all ocean water in the sea to Mars. Oh wait...
stuff
The point of this screen saver is to increase the running costs of those website.
Who do you believe?
TODO: 753) write sig.
The spammer's response is a strong indication that it's a pretty good idea, and one they really don't like and see as an actual threat to them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The main cost of spam is not the extra bandwidth it consumes. It's the human time lost in sorting the real mail from the crap every goddamn day. If by fighting it we (temporarily) double or triple the bandwidth wasted, I say, who cares?
What next? Users attack hardware vendors for not releasing drivers for graphics cards? Political parties make screensavers which overload the web servers of the opposition? We do not want to go there.
I guess this time they should consider themselves lucky that someone didn't manage to remove positive control over the screensavers from Lycos, effectively turning their DDoS zombie network into a tool for spammers. It would have been such a sweet irony of the very network of DDoS-agents created to thwart spammers would be turned into a spamming network.
I don'y believe it's either. The screen saver does not do a DNS, in fact it's written not to. The spammers obviously want a lot of traffic to their sites (they cram my mailboxes to try to get that traffic. Even started hitting my gmail mailbox tonight, and I've never given out that gmail address!). So I just see the application as a handy way to give them the traffic they want, maybe they can stop sending me so much mail to try to get it now. And it's hardly unethical. It's being done to try to stop or slow the scourage of the Internet. No ethical issues about it, these people not only cram inboxes to the extreme (some accounts where I get hundreds of pieces of spam a day are completely useless to me anymore), they have expanded their efforts to trojans and viruses to take over other systems. Any effort to slow or stop such people cannot be unethical.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Your company advocates a
() technical ( ) legislative () market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
"DOS style attack"? Hardly - it actively monitors the servers to prevent them going off line. A DOS attack goes all out to take a server down.
All Lycos is doing is send hits out to slow down a server. How is that different to posting a link in a news article in Slashdot? We all know that will get slashdotted, yet links are still posted. In both Lycos' and Slashdot's cases, something deliberate is done which causes a degredation in server perfomance. I don't see how it's any more of a DOS style attack than slashdotting a site.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
That's the underreported part of this story. Our shining champion in the spam epidemic is long-time villain in the spyware epidemic. No thanks, I'll pass.
Play Command HQ online
(I'm not saying I think this is a good idea - but reading the article before making bogus critical claims would seem like a wise plan to me.)
I see the emotional reasoning behind what you wrote, but in all reality you could cause collateral damage on sites hosted by the same ISP, or even the same network provider.
What should be done is to simply put pressure on the ISPs hosting these spammers, and cut them off by blocking their mail-servers and even web-servers used to sell their goods.
The "spam attack" was a PR-stunt by Lycos (first tested in Sweden), which apparently back-fired now.
Every one knows Geeks are the good guys!
Sindri Traustason.
No, offcourse it won't help. Lycos knows that too.
Yes, it changes the way a lot of people look at spam. On makelovenotspam.com you (should) see a map where you can "click to annoy a spammer". This visualisation of where the spammers are, makes it more clear that it does nog come frome 'somewhere', but from somebody real. And you can really do something about it with a little help from Lycos!
People who did not have a picture of spam comes from known places, are really changed. This is not about IT-experts, but about ordinary people who hate spam too (and are possible customers of Lycos, ofcourse...). Wait and see for the adverts from Lycos "Lycos, active spam-killer", and you'll be surprised what will happen in a Spanish* court-room, when a spammer sues Lycos...
*) Lycos is a company from Spain
Does this make sense? Ive seen it suggested somewhere:
One of the problems with spam is all the companies selling software that 'sends ten million emails a day'. Given that this is hardly likely to be for legitimate use (does your company have 10 million subscribers?) heres a way to hurt their pockets.
Go to google
Search for bulk email software
Click once on every google ad on the RHS.
Repeat each day.
Every click costs the spam (sorry *direct marketing*) company maybe $0.05. If everyone on slashdot did it, these companies would be hit bigtime. Their ad budgets would be used up, and their conversion rate would be zero.
Its not going to rid us of spam, but it IS one way to fuck up the assholes that make this stuff so easy.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Hmmm.. Lycos should have expected this, as others here have pointed out. Others have also said that the way to go is the legal route, which I agree is the only long-term solution.
However, I would suggest that the approach to take is to target the retailers that are using the services of spammers. Spammers themselves are just the middle men and they get paid, I assume, by the folks who actualy sell the products in the first place. This also helps with the problems associated with targeting a spam server in Uzbekistan or somwhere.
It would require some interesting re interpretations of existing legislation or mabey some new laws. IANAL, so I nave no idea of the implications of doing this.
It's more like a 'screendestroyer'
I downloaded this yesterday. What does it do apart from use up spammers bandwidth? It keeps essentialy the same non changing image up on the screen. Er no thanks. My shiny new 19" TFT isn't going anywhere near that.
I know CRTs can now cope with static images, but TFTs can't.
I don't know who is more ignorant, the people that really don't understand their computer or you, for that attitude.
Just because you don't understand something does NOT make you 'deserving' of harm.
You need to get it thru your head ( and others like you ) that the common man DOES NOT understand the risks NOR SHOULD THEY. They are USERS not TECHIES...
Until you require people pass a test to have a PC, then you can not expect the user to have any knowledge about it.
Would you expect a TV watcher to understand how their TV works? All the digital and analog components? How the electrons are formed and manipulated on their way to the screen? If they don't, they might see something offensive.. got to hold them responsible for lack of specific technical knowledge beyond their normal life.
Or how about nuclear power generation, because they might get shocked by the power..
Get over yourself... You are what gives us all a bad name.
Man, I shouldn't feed the trolls....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Those ads cost more than a nickle to click on my friend. Depending on the populatiry of the search, one click can cost as much as $20.00, (that I have seen myself). My company uses this advertising method and it has been successful so far. Our per click advertising average is about $13.00. That's definatelyy per click too. I am sure other people who use this form of google ad can confirm this.
You certainly have a point. If an ISP gets paid to host a spamvertised web site, they do not care. All of the spam comes either from off-shore servers or zombies. This does not affect the ISP. The Lycos approach is not making this the ISP's problem.
The thing that totally bugs me is that ISPs are not cracking down more on zombies. The terms of service should state that the ISP can read your outgoing mail if you send more than 500 emails a day. They can then shut down your connection if you are sending spam. If all of the zombies were cut off, spam would likely be reduced by 80%.
I downloaded and installed the screensaver a Monday night. I like it. I certainly do not think that this is the perfect solution. But at least is may accomplish something! Every other spam tactic that I have seen to stop the source has amounted to a big fat nothing. Filtering you mail still works, but is a pain.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I have no problem fighting them in this way, so long as the software is careful and uses the more conservative and less political blackhole lists (such as SpamHaus).
Our government has no clue when it comes to technology. It's not the government's job ALONE to protect us. Sometimes we have to do it ourselves.
I'd like to see a version of this that DoS's banner ad services that do drive by malware installs...
Corporatism != Free Market
You dont get the blacklists from lycos.
i sp am_screensaver/
"The sites targeted will come from blacklists generated by Spamcop and other anti-spam organizations"
http://www.spamfo.co.uk/News/Software/Lycos_ant
From a previous news article I had read lycos is just making it available to download, and marketing it so to speak, but another company developed it, and im guessing since the site is down/comprimised,and that you can not access the black list its hosted somewhere other then lycos. But I could be wrong.
TruePunk | Games
This looks like news forgery to me. Is there any indication of a security breach at Lycos? All we seem to have is "an anonymous reader" telling Slashdot that the screensaver was compromised, and at least one blog repeating what has been said on Slashdot. Maybe this is just another PR stunt by Lycos, or a spammer trolling Slashdot?
With Lycos relying on Javascript to get their message out, I sure won't waste my time trying to decipher it. If they can tell me where the spammer websites are, I'll be happy to evaluate their opinion and take appropriate action against those sites myself, after careful consideration. Lend Lycos my hardware and IP address, so that they can mastermind a DDoS attack disguised as me? Certainly not.
Comcast has an automated policy that if you send/receive some significant number of emails in some short time, it will block all message from that email address. When I setup my new firewall I made the mistake of telling it to email me on every identified attack instead of just once per day. This ended up immediately issuing 6-10 emails per minute, and I didn't catch it until about 30-45 minutes later. The damage was already done. Three months later and I still can't get Comcast to unblock that email address. At least the wonderfully intelligent and helpful customer service rep on the phone was able to give me a new email addy to start using...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Can anyone in the U.S. who is getting the h4x0r3d message verify this IP?
Querying a U.S. DNS server and a European DNS server yeilds the same result:
Both have the same Authority Section as well:
Does anyone know of a DNS server that yeilds something differnet?
I can, and the IP comes back to a DGC Systems in Sweden
If someone else can pull the whois information and verify that as well?
person: Jimmie Clareus
address: Softroom GDC
address: Box 1088
address: S-161 02 BROMMA
address: SE
e-mail: jimmie.clareus@softroom.se
phone: +46 8 410 22 600
mnt-by: DGCSYSTEMS-MNT
nic-hdl: JC2251-RIPE
I for one think restricting port 25 is a good idea. :-) (esp. when you consider how many Zombies that stops dead in their tracks).
My ISP blocks 25 by default. If you contact tech support and request that it be enabled they bump you to tier3 support, who quiz you breifly to ensure you are capable of securing it and then open it for you. Not a bad deal all together. The quiz is really just a checklist:
1) You know port 25 is for a mailserver right?
2) Do you know how to configure your mailserver so it won't be an open relay?
3) Promise you won't send spam.
4) Port 25 is now open.
Works for me
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
He downloaded and ran it. That problem was solved. Shame he didn't realise that there were other viruses in there too (or wasn't told that there might well me). Still, it's more than many ISPs do...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Sweet. A Lycos sponsered, remote controlled army of zombies.
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
Was surfing around and managed to find an alternate site where you can grab the infamous anti-spam screensaver : http://www.mungdungus.com/MLNS.zip Enjoy :)
Spamming is prevalent because it is literally free of cost to the spammers. This tool threatens to raise the cost of spamming end via excessive bandwidth demands at the spammer server end. If the cost of spamming became prohibitive then spam would be extinct and they would not have the resources to retain hackers to carry out their malicious efforts like deceptive URLs and hijacking innocent PCs as spam boxes.
The Lycos tool makes that threat very real. The spammers know this and they have focused their attack on the tool.
If they take legal action arguing that attacks on their ISPs was damaging their liveliehood, the same can be said of spammers' attacks on our inboxes and compromised PCs. When you accuse someone by pointing at them, there are always three fingers pointing back towards you.
Legislative actions are ineffective thanks to lobbying efforts from direct marketing organizations of which spammers are a member. The CANSPAM accomplishes nothing and trumps more aggressive state laws. If the government cannot provide relief, then the private sector will seek alternatives without their help.
It was only inevitable that this happened.
Begun, the spam war has.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10