A Dose Of Their Own Medicine

Lycos Europe launched a new service this week designed to get back at spammers. They offered a free screensaver that would do automated access attempts on sites advertised in Spam mail, in order to drive up their bandwidth costs. Now it seems that they were too successful. Netcraft analyzed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets. Two of the sites, bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, have been completely knocked offline. One other site, rxmedherbals.info, has been responding to requests only intermittently. Lycos had promised not to hit any site so hard that they would constitute a Denial of Service attack. Guess they didn't know their own strength.