Thursday, December 02, 2004
Fighting spam... with spam
I love the idea, but I was worried it might work a bit too well, and cause a backlash. And it has. Lycos' new screensaver lets you put your idle PC to good use, sending endless requests to identified spam sites, using up their bandwidth and eventually knocking them offline. It's a great strategy, and has worked too well for some, with Lycos now coming under fire for distributing what many see as a tool for launching denial of service attacks.
But I'll wager this won't be the last time we'll see a tool like this, and in fact I wonder if this kind of 'active' security could be applied to viruses and suchlike, and not just spam. instead of waiting to be attacked, and then trying to do something about it, we might have specifically designed agents to patrol our networks, in search of any suspicious behaviour. I'd welcome anything that makes viruses and spam less likely to reach my machine, but some caution is advised. the point has already been made that it's all too easy for a typo or other error to list a legitimate site as a spammer...
I love the idea, but I was worried it might work a bit too well, and cause a backlash. And it has. Lycos' new screensaver lets you put your idle PC to good use, sending endless requests to identified spam sites, using up their bandwidth and eventually knocking them offline. It's a great strategy, and has worked too well for some, with Lycos now coming under fire for distributing what many see as a tool for launching denial of service attacks.
But I'll wager this won't be the last time we'll see a tool like this, and in fact I wonder if this kind of 'active' security could be applied to viruses and suchlike, and not just spam. instead of waiting to be attacked, and then trying to do something about it, we might have specifically designed agents to patrol our networks, in search of any suspicious behaviour. I'd welcome anything that makes viruses and spam less likely to reach my machine, but some caution is advised. the point has already been made that it's all too easy for a typo or other error to list a legitimate site as a spammer...
Comments:
Post a Comment
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS