SmartMobs reports that Lycos is planning to raise the cost of spam with a gentle DDOS attack. Yes, gentle.

Lycos-Europe is distributing a free downloadable screensaver called Make Love Not Spam that directs a low-intensity distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) at URLs contained in spam messages.

The BBC article quoted at SmartMobs reports:

Mr Pollmann said there was no intention to stop the spam websites working by subjecting them with too much data to cope with.

He said the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web.

“Every single user will contribute three to four megabytes per day,” he said, “about one MP3 file.”

But, he said, if enough people sign up spamming websites could be force to pay for gigabytes of traffic every single day.

Then SmartMobs quotes The Register:

A spokesman for Lycos in Germany told The Register he believed that the tool could generate 3.4MB in traffic on a daily basis. When 10m screensavers are downloaded and used, the numbers quickly add up, to 33TB.

And all I have to say is that I couldn’t begin to imagine the hosting costs of 33TB/day. Read the SmartMobs story for all the relevant URLs.

Posted December 1, 2004 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. .

4 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

User contributed tags for this post: