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The Rise and Fall of an Anti-Spam Screensaver

I have been seeing reports about Lycos’s new anti-spam screensaver the entire week but haven’t had a chance to write about it.

The Register originally ran a story a week ago describing a new screensaver from Lycos which sent traffic to known spam sites. The list of sites was taken from SpamCop. As well known SpamCop compiles its list based on reports received from users which makes the “rule by mob” scenario very possible (see this post). While Lycos claimed that the list of sites was reviewed, no one really knew for sure. Additionally, they also claimed that they would throttle the screensavers so sites would not be taken down completely.

What followed was a complete farce making Lycos’s reputation even worse than it was before (at least in the anti-spam area). F-Secure reported that Lycos’s site was defaced, probably by spammers. Lycos denied the story meanwhile. At the same time Netcraft reported that Lycos actually crippled sites of spammers instead of throttling like they have promised (just think of what happens if there is a mistake). Today after realizing exactly how big the mess that they made is, Lycos finally pulled down the screensaver from their site.

Of course most in the security community did not look positive at the original screensaver simply because you don’t fight fire with fire (Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs, Bruce Schneier of CounterPane, Phil Hallam-Baker of Verisign and others). There is just too much potential for colleteral damage such as other sites hosted on the same ISPs or server being taken down, or the upstream ISPs getting hammered. And of course, who checks that the list of spam sites is actually legit – “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes”. The bottom line is that the Internet is simple too big and too interconnected to start doing DDOS attacks even for seemingly good purposes. You never what you might destroy in the process…

Tags: security, spam —

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