SEL: Bringing Spammers to their Knees?

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November 29, 2004

Bringing Spammers to their Knees?

Interesting report from the BBC...

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

An interesting approach but what if the spammers fight back? I'm not a hacker, but I bet any screensaver that is able to connect to an internet server, is also susceptible to receiving internet connections too! I'll give it a week before someone figures out how to send a virus or trojan to all the Lycos screensaver users.

Thanks to Jeff for the tip.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

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