On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, n3td3v wrote: > It is and never will be an acceptable and effective way to beat spam or > any other misuse of the internet. [...] > Spammers and hax0rs will not allow Lycos EU to build its bot network > of screensavers, if and when the site comes back online again.
Why would they bother "not allow Lycos EU to..." if it was not an effective way to harm their so-called business? They bothered ergo it must have had the potential to harm them. Of course it was pretty stupid to try to fight those bastards using a system with a single point of failure (both in technical and legal sense). > The screensaver can't be allowed to be a socially acceptable way to > solve any internet based problem. Desperate situations demand desperate measures. The spammers are *already* DDoSing us (*). And it gets worse every day. Retaliation might be questionable from the ethical point of view but it is be one of the last weapons left in our arsenal. (*) For instance, one of our servers was joe-jobbed in June. The poor machine was unable to handle the extra traffic (400-500 mails/hour) and kept crashing until I blacklisted most of the zombies in a rather brutal way (the blacklist consists of several /8 and tens of /16 blocks!). It reduced the traffic to an acceptable level (tens/hour) but they still have not given up. They've been joe-jobbing one machine for five months without an interruption! You got to admire such persistence! --Pavel Kankovsky aka Peak [ Boycott Microsoft--http://www.vcnet.com/bms ] "Resistance is futile. Open your source code and prepare for assimilation." _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
