You just knew it had to happen, right?
You can’t take aim at a group of spammers and just expect them to sit there quietly and take it on the chin. At least, not if you have half a brain. I mean, spammers aren’t really known for their social gracefulness, let alone their restraint.
So of course, it had to happen that as soon as Lycos decided to target spammers by essentially enabling thousands of users of their “Make Love Not Spam” screensaver to DDOS the spammers’ websites, that the spammers would in turn do what they do best. Wreak havoc.
Therefore it should come as no surprise that Silicon.com is reporting that hackers took down the Lycos “Make Love Not Spam” download site within hours of it going live, and in fact replaced the home page with one of their own design, which read:
“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.”
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Of course, while it’s unlikely that they are recording the IP addresses of people who merely surf over to the Lycos site, as Aunty brought up in her previous discussion of the Lycos initiative, it is quite likely that the processes called by the screensaver are revealing the user’s IP address to the spammers being targetted. And if you think that they are unhappy with Lycos, and will take down the Lycos site, just for suggesting that you install this software, just think how unhappy they will be with you for actually using it against them, and what they might do with your IP address.
Hopefully by now Aunty has convinced you that taking part in this program is a Bad Idea. But if you are still going to do it anyways, Aunty would sure love to hear your reasoning.
You can read more about this at Silicon.com
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IF only it weren’t legal, it would certainly be worth doing – even if they tried to target each individual. At a certain critical mass of users, it would be difficult to combat – as they themselves well know. You probably recall that Spammers have, on occasion, been responsible for zombie DOS attacks (not just with e-mail) but at the TCP/IP level.
Then the screen saver utility is flawed. Spoofing the source IP is quite easy, and in fact is what the util should be doing. Then the SPAMmers have no idea of where the DOS packets are coming from.
Better still would be for the util to use a DFDOS (Distributed & Reflected DOS) approach: ping super-high-bandwidth switches and servers on the Internet with SYN packets with the source IP set to the IP of the SPAMmer, and the shb switch/server will send SYN/ACK packets back to the SPAMmer, only anywhere from 4- to 10-fold the volume.
Taking the passive approach to the SPAM problem is akin to telling the schoolchildren to just ignore the huge bully who is terrorizing them, that the bully is just looking for attention. We’ve got black eyes and bloody noses here! Ghandi’s approach of non-violent non-cooperation only works against civilized people who will eventually realize that what they are doing is wrong. This does not apply to SPAMmers. Kick em, and kick em hard!
Ah, but I can change my IP address within a few minutes, and I can do without if with MUCH less inconvenience than dealing with all of that SPAM! For my money, give me any and every tool to discourage and identify the spammers, then throw them in jail and give me their machines! ;-)