Lycos, remember them? I think they might have been my search engine of choice around 1997, somewhere between Infoseek and AltaVista, way before young upstarts like LookSmart and Google arrived on the scene.

Well according to the Reg (via AndyN), Lycos are behind a new screensaver designed to launch DDOS attacks on spammers! Well okay, not to completely shut spam servers down, but to slow them down markedly.

Hmm. I hate spam as much as the next man, but I’m not sure about this. Could do nasty things to your local traffic (watch out if you pay by the Mb when you’re over your limit). You wouldn’t want to be trying to use bits of the Innanet close by to the spammers, and you sure as hell wouldn’t want to get yourself falsely identified as running a spam server. (Hey, if I can be identified as running a hacker/phreaking journal, anything can happen).

And of course, way for Lycos to come under fire by the spammers, who have apparently already hacked the page with a message saying “Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn’t be doing it. Your ip address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.”

This could be war. (Lycos Europe deny their server was hacked, that the spammers rigged it so people get a different one.)