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Lycos Europe Launches “Make Love Not Spam”
Jeremy L. Muncy
Staff Writer
2004-11-30
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Internet portal Lycos has designed a new type of screensaver, one which constantly requests data from sites that sell items featured in spam emails.
 | | Lycos Europe Goes After Spammers... |  |
Lycos hopes that their new offensive against spam will make the spammers monthly bandwidth bill sky rocket, by keeping their servers running 24/7.
"We've never really solved the big problem of spam which is that its so damn cheap and easy to do," said Malte Pollmann, spokesman for Lycos Europe.
"We've found a way to make it much higher cost for spammers by putting a load on their servers."
Lycos estimates that if enough enraged spam victims sign up and download the new tool, spammers could possibly end up paying for terabytes of data being sent out.
Now, don't get me wrong… I don't like spam any better than the next guy, but back in the old days this kind of thing was called a DOS (denial of service) attack and was generally frowned upon.
With Cell Phones In Their Sights, Skulls & Cabir Join Together. A new variant of the Skulls Trojan has been unleashed. The newest version of the virus come bundled with one of the first cell phone viruses, called Cabir.
The hybrid of the two viruses, dubbed Skulls.B, displays skull images on Symbian handhelds instead of the default icons and it releases the Cabir worm.
The Cabir worm was originally released earlier this year; it spreads itself to other handsets within the Bluetooth broadcasting range. Cabir asks its victims if they would like to be infected, which led most experts to believe that it was just a proof-of-concept virus.
If infected by the Cabir worm, the phone displays the word "Caribe" on the screen as the worm changes the Symbian OS. F-Secure has stated that phones from Nokia, Panasonic, Siemens, and Sendo are all vulnerable
SCO Homepage Defaced By Hackers. Yesterday morning someone replaced an image atop SCO's homepage with some slight modifications. The altered graphic read "we own all your code" and "pay us all your money." This spoof was a very well created; they used the same colors and font as the normal SCO header.
Just a few hours after the hack was noticed everything was back to normal. Monday's hack was the latest in a string of attacks against SCO. Earlier this year a variant of the MyDoom virus crippled their website.
Don't Be Expecting SP5 For Windows 2000. Recently Microsoft decided to make its final update to Windows 2000 a large collection of previously released patches & fixes than an all new service pack for the OS.
"Because Microsoft believes the Update Rollup will meet the needs of customers better than a new service pack, there will be no Service Pack 5 (SP5) for Windows 2000," the software maker said. "Therefore, SP4 becomes the final service pack for Windows 2000."
Unless their plans change, this will be the last significant update for Windows 2000, which is still widely used by businesses. Microsoft is beginning to slow down development and support efforts for the OS, mainstream support is set to end next June, with extended support slated to end in 2010.
About the Author:
Jeremy Muncy is the editor of http://www.SecurityProNews.com.
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