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Spammers may be about to get a taste of their own medicine. A
British company is launching software that it claims will allow computer users
to hit back at the mass mailers who clog up our inboxes with sales pitches for
pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and cheap medication.
Lycos UK is offering free screensavers designed to
counter-attack the junk e-mailers by turning their own techniques against them.
Entitled, somewhat confusingly, Make Love, Not Spam, the
campaign aims to harness the coordinated power of under-occupied computers and
bombard blacklisted sites with streams of email requests which will slow down
targeted addresses and interfere with their business.
 Similar methods have been used for scientific challenges which
require enormous computing capacity, such as finding a cure for cancer or
sifting through the data gathered by Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence. This is believed to be the first time the principle of distributed
computing, which harnesses the power of computers while they are idle, has been
employed against antisocial behavior online.
The modern internet increasingly reverberates to the electronic
squelch of dud emails hitting inboxes. Lycos estimates that there will soon be
35 spam e-mails sent to each inbox every day.
MessageLabs, which scans 100 mn e-mails a day for 9,000
corporate clients worldwide, reckons that as many as 70m of those are junk. Many
of the pornographic and dubious financial sites operate from addresses in
eastern Europe, the US or South America.
Lycos's proposal has divided opinion. Some professionals warn
it will invite retaliation. Others welcome the initiative as a chance to strike
back. "We have upped the ante," said Wessel Van Rensburg of Lycos.
"We are serious about combating spam. There's a risk we will receive some
denial of service attacks in the next few days but we are ready."
Van Rensburg said the plan was not to target the sites that send
out spam, which are often hijacked computers, but to hit the sites that the spam
benefits, many of them pornographic and based in eastern Europe. "If you
want to call it vigilante action, so be it."
But Matt Sergeant, the chief anti-spam technologist at
MessageLabs, said he did not approve of fighting network abuse with further
network abuse. "It's too difficult to get it exactly right," he
said. "The safeguards now in place are not too bad."
The Guardian
Compiled by Vimarsh Bajpai Page(s) 1
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