Screensaver to fight spam
Lycos recently made a free screen saver available for download. What make this one different? It allows users to take part in a DDoS attack against spammers.
The biggest hurdle that spam fighters face is that it is so cheap and easy to do. But, the possible returns are huge. All it takes is a “friendly” host and a little time to send out millions of messages to innocent email users. Lycos decided to give something to users to allow them to fight back.
The screen saver sends traffic to sites that sell goods advertised by spam. Each user reportedly only contributes 3-4 megs as to not overload their connection. But, with the 20,000 copies of the screensaver already downloaded ahead of the official release; that small amount of data can add up to big numbers for the offending web sites.
The goal of the software is to make it expensive to spam.
What makes this stupid is that users of the screen saver are effectivly taking part in a DDoS attack. Instead of unknowing users, they are instead opting in to take part. Part of the problem with spam is that it takes such a high percentage of resources out of the internet. Estimates put spam at 40% of internet traffic, and it is expected to become the majority by the end of the year. All this is doing is putting even more unnecessary traffic back into the internet.
Source: BBC News