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According to reports, antispam company Blue Security found itself the victim of such an attack after its antispam methods choked the servers of a Russian spammer.

Blue Security's Blue Frog service launches a wave of opt out requests to the servers of websites behind spamming campaigns for its users. When the servers of one 'pharmamaster' were hit in such a manner,

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he or she responded in kind.

Blue Security's userbase was subsequently hit with a barrage of emails threatening even more spam unless they remove themselves from Blue Frog. On top of this Blue Security has been the target of a denial of service attack that has now been running for a number of days.

Blue Security's response was to move its home page to a blog hosted at Six Apart's TypePad. This was not lost on Mr 'Pharmamaster': the DDOS attack hit the blog too, to the extent that the entire range of Six Apart's services, including TypePad and LiveJournal, was brought to its knees.

This lasted for about seven and a half hours, and although Six Apart's services have been restored, Blue Security remains heavily under fire.

It recalls the problems suffered by Lycos at the end of 2004 when the company, unsuccessfully, tried to take on the spammers at their own game, with its 'make love not spam' service.