Lycos Europe says it is officially ending its MakeLoveNotSpam anti-spam campaign, saying the controversial campaign has accomplished its objectives. The company also said traffic from users of the MakeLoveNotSpam screensaver wasn't responsible for outages at two spammer sites targeted during the attacks.

"Lycos has decided to close down its Make Love, Not Spam website," said spokesperson Malte Pollmann. "The aim of the campaign was to ignite a debate about anti-spam measures. We feel that we have achieved this through our activity and will now continue that debate with others in the email industry. We hope that this will lead to further new and innovative solutions to the problem of spam."

The company also says a published list of sites affected by traffic from the screensaver represented "historic data" and not ongoing activity. Netcraft used the list as a guide in analyzing the screensaver's impact, monitoring three sites which Lycos cited as being hardest hit by its campaign. Our analysis found two of the three sites cited by MakeLoveNotSpam were not available, and attributed this status to traffic generated by the screensaver. Lycos Europe says its attacks on those particular sites had already ceased.

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During November all of the sites monitored experienced some failed requests, with New York Internet the most reliable site during the period, followed by Pair Networks.

Half of the top ten sites were running BSD based operating systems, with four running Linux, and hosting.com nee Express Technologies running Windows.

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Lycos Europe appears to have at least temporarily taken down its MakeLoveNotSpam site, which has been distributing a screensaver that directs distributed attacks against web sites used by spammers. 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 yesterday.

The site has shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both housed at the web servers of Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site.

Click for larger image.

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Some major internet backbones are preventing access to the new Lycos "anti-spam" screensaver web site at www.MakeLoveNotSpam.com. This controversial site provides Internet users with the ability to participate in distributed attacks against web sites used by spammers, leaving the spammers with slow connections and high bandwidth costs.

Many users have reported problems accessing the web site since it was announced a few days ago. At first, these difficulties were thought to be as a result of the web site's success or revenge attacks by spammers. It now appears that some major Internet backbones are denying access to the IP address used to host www.MakeLoveNotSpam.com. Tracing a route to the host from Netcraft's main site in the UK reveals that access to the MakeLoveNotSpam.com site has been blackholed by Global Crossing's worldwide network, leaving the site accessible from some areas but not others:

A dynamically updating chart of site performance for MakeLoveNotSpam.com is available here.

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A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack launched by users of Lycos Europe's MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver has succeeded in crippling several spammer sites, but some of the targeted sites remain available.

While Internet users debate the ethics of the initiative, Lycos Europe is denying reports that the MakeLoveNotSpam site was hacked and defaced last night. An intrusion by hackers would be a serious concern for an operation that controls an army of computers with DDoS capabilities. The site has been unreachable today, which could be related to traffic from Slashdot rather than a counterattack.

Lycos Europe is offering a "screensaver that spams the spammers," using idle computer time to attack sites that have been blacklisted for abusive spamming practices. Monitoring of three of the targets housed on Chinese servers shows that two of the sites, bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, have been knocked offline by the attack. A third target, rxmedherbals.info, has remained largely available, with intermittent outages.

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