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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Thursday, December 2, 2004
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Spammers fight back Posted by Alexey @ 09:37 GMT

In an interesting twist, apparently one of the spam sites under attack from Lycos' "Make Love not Spam" operation has turned the tables. The front page of a spammer site called www.moretgage.info (which used to sell cheap mortgage loans) has been changed to contain a Meta Refresh tag, redirecting all web traffic to...www.makelovenotspam.com.

As an end result, depending on how the Lycos client works, the screen savers downloaded from makelovenotspam.com might be attacking the download site itself.

In another development, Lycos made a statement that this site was not defaced two days ago (see our weblog post on November 30th). However, we've received three independent reports from users who saw the defacement and even made screen shots of it...including one report from an editor of a computer magazine.

Update on 4th of December, 2004: Lycos has confirmed to us that their screensaver does not follow Meta Refresh tags, so this attempt by spammers will fail. --Mikko