Screensaver hits back at spammers
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INTERNET users fed up with spam can go on the offensive by downloading a screensaver aimed at hitting junkmailers in the pocket, net portal Lycos said.
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The online community/portal company&#39;s offensive against spammers began this week, when it started distributing a screensaver that conducts a denial-of-service attack against sites that market products via spam.
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(InfoWorld) - Is the fight against spam horribly misguided? For years, spam haters have relied on junk-mail filters and Internet blacklists, but lately some are saying it's time for a change in tactics.                                                     Their answer: follow the money. And that means going after the Web sites where spammers sell their pharmaceuticals and watches and male enhancement products. Misguided or not, it's pretty easy to argue that the fight against spam has been a losing proposition of late. At the end of last year, mail administrators noticed a big spike in the amount of spam flooding their inboxes. Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic monitored by Symantec, and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now. Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down. "This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring," he said. "What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions." Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed Bruen's position, saying that anti-spam fighters could really hurt the spammers' bottom lines by targeting their Web sites. "If there was more diligence in taking down the Web sites, that would have an effect on overall spam," said Chris Fleizach, a research assistant at UC San Diego. Bruen says current approaches to spam fighting evolved out of a different era -- before spam was widely used for online fraud or delivering malicious software. "When this problem started out, people were annoyed, and a lot of the junk mail at that time was urban legends and chain letters and stuff that wasn't as much of a threat as it is now," he said. Over the past four years, Bruen has tried to move the fight to a new front with his project KnujOn (that's "no junk" backward, for those who aren't into word games), which has helped shut down more than 30,000 spammer Web sites. The project asks volunteers to send in their spam, and it uses these submissions to build a large database linking sites to known spammers. To date, it has helped take down more than 32,000 of these junk mail sites. When the project launched, KnujOn tracked just a few thousand Web sites in its database, but that number has now grown to several hundred thousand. Interestingly, the total number of spamming groups has remained constant -- somewhere around 50. "There really aren't many people involved in this," Bruen said. That's one reason why people such as Bruen think that they can make a real difference by targeting the Web. Though critics say that KnujOn may end up fighting the same war of attrition that has already occurred with e-mail blocking, Bruen thinks he can eventually wear the spammers out. "There's a point of exhaustion where they run out of places to go," he said. KnujOn isn't the only group targeting spammer Web sites. Earlier this month, Computer Cops, the company that runs the PIRT (Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination) phishing take-down program, expanded its efforts to and began doing the same thing. Computer Cops believes many of the spamming groups are responsible for a lot of other online crime. "We're trying to take a look at all of the Internet crime out there and do criminal profiles," said Paul Laudanski, the company's owner and the leader of the PIRT project. Crime-fighting groups that focus only on spam or phishing don't get the full picture, he added. "If one organization is only focusing on one thing, they're missing a lot of criminal activity." Scott Conti recently signed on as one of KnujOn's 1,300 registered contributors because he liked the project's Web-centric approach. "There aren't many people going back to the source," said Conti, the director of information technology at Greenfield Community College, in Greenfield, Mass. "That's what I thought was interesting about it. They are actually trying to take a proactive approach by going after the sites and going after the ISPs that are hosting them." Greenfield College is now contributing between 50 and 100 spam samples per week to KnujOn, and in return it gets back information it can use to blacklist spam sites. The college needs all the help it can get. About 96 percent of the 90,000 e-mail messages processed each day by Greenfield's IT department are spam, Conti said. It's one of his biggest headaches, Conti said. "We probably get more vocal complaining about spam than just about any other problem we're likely to have."
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Lycos Europe has recently joined the fight against spam by releasing a screensaver as part of its "Make Love Not Spam" campaign, which uses its participants machines to bombard websites that advertise through spam e-mails with data, effectively launching a distributed denial of service attack against them, with the intent being to push up bandwidth bills of the spammers who operate these websites.    Is this an effective new front in the battle against spam?
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Internet users are being given the chance to hit back at the spammers that have become the scourge of the web, thanks to free software being distributed by Lycos Europe, the internet portal.
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Lycos Europe has shut down its screensaver, makelovenotspam, which delighted many Internet users with the opportunity to flood spammers&#39; Web sites with junk e-mail.
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MADRID, Spain Some computer users are about to find out if fighting fire with fire works when they fight spam with spam. German-based Lycos Europe offers a free screensaver program that hits back at spam senders by flooding them with junk traffic.
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Blog: Spammers appear to defeat Captcha and use fake Microsoft and Yahoo Web mail addresses to spread spam.
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A spammer whom authorities say e-mailed more than 9 billion unwanted advertisements for products like erection pills faces a hefty fine: If he needs headache medication or debt relief there's probably an unsolicited ad in his own inbox.
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New software allows recipients of spam to band together to target known websites behind the messages. The idea is to bombard the sites with messages, slowing them down and making them more expensive to run.
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com. Lycos Europe is taking the fight to the enemy, launching a screensaver that conducts a group denial-of-service attack against sites marketing products via spam.
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Paris - A virus that spies on keystrokes and downloads passwords and bank account details is circulating among e-mails. It masquerades as a screensaver designed by internet portal Lycos to attack spammers, a watchdog warned on Thursday.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites appears to have been too successful.
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In a new take on fighting spam, Web portal Lycos Europe has launched a screensaver designed to bombard Web sites promoted in unsolicited e-mail.
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Lycos Europe released a screen saver that would pepper spam sites with requests for pages, in an effort to burden their bandwidth.  Now it's disabled, but in very fixable ways...
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In ordering a New Hampshire man to stop sending spyware that takes over parts of a user&#39;s computer, a federal judge has sent a warning shot at spammers in the United States.
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Several Internet companies, including Microsoft and eBay, are working on new ways to keep spammers from infiltrating their sites.