Spam Sites Crippled by Lycos Screensaver DDoS (Netcraft)

Spam Sites Crippled by Lycos Screensaver DDoS (Netcraft)

The netcraft report seems to confuse matters. In the original announcement, it was carefully noted that the purpose of the screen saver was not to knock out the sites, but to cost them more money (for bandwidth) than they could recoup from the, er, customers. It said clearly that they meant to throttle the activity so as not to make the target sites entirely inaccessible. Maybe they failed, in the cases netcraft cites, or maybe they were successful and exceeded the sites' prepaid bandwidth caps. In the latter case, the owners would have declined to pay for more bandwidth, and thus might reasonably be said, by Lycos, to have taken their own sites down. (An ISP that bills a spammer site "net 30" deserves to be stiffed.)

I doubt that spammers can make the screen saver attack Lycos by straightforward means. However, it seems likely that a spammer's zombie network might end up hosting several thousand copies of the screen saver, which would then be subject to compromise and be made to attack other targets, and Lycos would be blamed. Or, the zombies might just be made to pretend to be running the screensaver, regardless of whether it has been loaded, and attack targets of the spammers' choice, with blame falling again on Lycos.