Lycos Europe Appears To Have Canned Its Spam War

Lycos Europe has apparently pulled the plug on its effort to orchestrate denial-of-service attacks against selected spammers.

Earlier this week, the online community/portal company started distributing a screensaver that conducted the attacks by making requests from servers "verified to be spam-advertising sites," Lycos said. The large number of requests executed from the PCs of spam haters who downloaded the software decreased the response time of some of the targeted sites by as much as 85 percent.

Spammers, however, apparently launched a counteroffensive. Security firms reported that some spammers had started redirecting requests to Lycos Europe's "Make Love, Not Spam" site, which distributed the screensaver, and had also defaced the site.

On Friday, the Lycos Europe site, which was down most of Thursday, remained inactive, with only a page containing a graphic and the words "Stay Tuned." In addition, Lycos Europe's main portal made no reference of the spammer-harassing screensaver.

Lycos Europe was not immediately available for comment.