Lycos Europe Cans Anti-Spam Effort
Lycos Europe attempted to get back at the leading spammers of the world through an initiative called ‘MakeLoveNotSpam’. The move was applauded by the ordinary user of the web considering more than a lakh users downloaded the screensaver from the official website. However, many ISPs and Internet groups criticized labeling it as a tit for tat policy, which was not good for the web.
Lycos Europe has denied any claims that they were doing DDoS attacks on the servers and have seen hacking attempt reports. One of the targeted website even directed all the traffic coming to its website on Lycos Servers!
The latest update is that Lycos have brought down the services temporarily and are not giving out any words on when it might be re-launched. Users of the screensavers have been seeing a ‘stay tuned’ message since the last couple of days and could expect the same in the near future.
The company reports that they are currently working on hosting and management issues that came out because of the screensaver. As for me… I had fun when it lasted. Spammers are a nuisance and are required to be dealt with seriously.
What are DDoS Attacks?
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an attack on a network which is designed to bring
it to a halt. This is done by sending useless traffic to a specific service/port on a server. The amount of traffic sent would overwhelm the service, so that legitimate traffic would be dropped or ignored.
DDoS attacks have developed from the wild 1997 basic DoS attacks. These attacks originate from one source and can emerge from 100’s of locations around the world. The most visible attacks were those in February 2000, where high traffic sites (eBay/Amazon/Yahoo/CNN/Buy.Com/Datek/ZDNet) were faced with the task of handling huge amounts of spoofed traffic. In recent days, there have been attacks on Cisco which resulted in considerable downtime. Some public blacklists have also been targeted by spammers and taken out of business.
Sushubh Mittal is the Tech Columnist at Search Engine Journal and the Editor of TechWhack.
