Just days after Lycos Europe’s launch of an anti-spam DDoS tool raised eyebrows in the security space, the company appears to have scrapped the campaign.Earlier this week, the company released a downloadable screensaver programmed to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against known spam sites, but the move sparked a shooting war with spammers and attracted condemnation from security researchers.
News source: eWeek On Friday, Lycos Europe gave up the ghost, posting a “Stay Tuned” note on the MakeLoveNotSpam.com Web site it was using to distribute the screensaver. The Lycos Europe home page, which heavily promoted the screensaver all week, was also scrubbed clean of any references to the screensaver.
Company officials did not respond to requests for comment, but security experts were not mincing words.
“I find the anti-spam downloadable DDoS tool to be without a doubt irresponsible, possibly illegal, sets a really bad precedent, gives the wrong impression to users, and possibly the dumbest thing I have heard of this week,” said Adrien de Beaupre, an incident handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC).
“I can summarize my thoughts into a single word. Dumb. With a capital ‘D,'” de Beaupre told eWEEK.com.
