Lycos antispam site taken offline

Lycos Europe appears to have taken down its controversial MakeLoveNotSpam site - temporarily, at least. The site now displays a graphic and the words "STAY TUNED." References to the site have also been removed from the Lycos Europe home page, where it was prominently featured, monitoring firm Netcraft reports.

Lycos this week released a screen saver that bombards spam websites with data to increase their cost of running such sites. But according to Netcraft the campaign has already knocked out some sites completely.

Lycos so far maintains that it has been careful to avoid completely shutting down the sites it targets as such distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are considered illegal in many European countries and the US.

Lycos has also shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both hosted by Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site.

The IP transfer is almost certainly the result of spammers redirecting traffic back to www.makelovenotspam.com, which means Lycos unintentionally launches a denial-of-service attack against its own anti-spam campaign web site.

To prevent further attacks by users, several major internet backbone providers and ISP’s are now blocking access to the Lycos web site, including Global Crossing's worldwide network. ®

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