Good. I've been hoping someone would target spam-friendly hosts, especially those in China.
Posted on 12/02/2004 1:11:41 PM PST by holymoly
Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign has killed access to some of the Web sites of its target alleged spammers, Netcraft has found.
According to the Internet traffic monitoring company, Lycos Europe has successfully taken two Web sites hosted in China offline. The sites are bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, according to a posting on Netcraft's Web site, dated this week.
"A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available," the posting said.
Lycos Europe was unavailable for comment on the matter, but the company said on Tuesday it was not carrying out DDoS attacks, just slowing the bandwidth of its targets. It added that it had no intention of taking Web sites offline.
"I have to be very clear that it's not a denial-of-service attack," Malte Pollmann, director of communications services for Lycos, said on Tuesday. "We slow the remaining bandwidth to 5 percent. It wouldn't be in our interests to (carry out DDoS attacks). It is to increase the cost of spamming. We have an interest to make this, economically, unattractive."
Lycos Europe is a separate company from the Web portal that bears the Lycos name in the United States. It claims that it maintains roughly 40 million e-mail accounts in eight European countries.
The "Make love not spam" screensaver site appeared to have been taken down by its operators on Wednesday. It now shows a graphic and the words "Stay tuned."
On Tuesday, the Web portal denied claims that it had been hit by hacker attacks, saying a reported defacement of the "Make love not spam" Web site was a hoax. But Netcraft, among others, reported that the Web site was unavailable at several intervals that day.
Good. I've been hoping someone would target spam-friendly hosts, especially those in China.
Now if they would go after the RIAA and destroy their hard-drives!
The solution is simple: if you want to spam, don't run a web site. Most of them don't.
RE: Lycos Europe has successfully taken two Web sites hosted in China
While these sorts of sites are portrayed often times as private ventures, I often wonder if they are not really experiments being run by the PLA, as they get ready to launch a major cyber attack against either Taiwan, the West or both.
That's a reasonable working hypothesis. Maybe some techies who helped set them up would know about some of these dudes...
Interesting, something like this would be right up either Russia or China's ally. Don't underestimate Russian influence from the underworld community here given that it is Europe.
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