Lycos toppled by spammers' revenge

By Steve Malone

Posted on 3 Dec 2004 at 13:56

The controversial web site has gone down. The suspicion is that it has succumbed to a counter attack from the spammers it was targeting.

The site was the brainchild of Lycos Europe with the aim of punishing the web sites operated by known spamming companies. Users could download a screensaver which would send continual requests to the spammers' sites, slowing them to a crawl.

The plan worked. Too well. The screensaver was downloaded more than 90,000 times with the resulting concerted denial of service attack bringing down the target web sites entirely. Now it seems the spammers are striking back.

Despite denials yesterday from Lycos Europe that the site was under attack according to web monitor NetCraft, the site has already had to change its IP address 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123 to avoid a revenge denial of service attack - presumably orchestrated by the spammers themselves. For a while, there was a holding page which simply said 'Stay Tuned'. However this site has now gone down entirely.