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Fighting spam with spam

A British company has stepped up the fight against illegal spam by developing software which it claims bombards blacklisted sites with email requests – slowing their operations down.

Lycos UK has created a free screensaver which uses idle computers to attack cybercriminal gangs' networks with their own spamming techniques.

It is hoped that the new technique will reduce the number of illegal emails that have to be dealt with by anti-spam and anti-virus software.

The screensaver works by using the processing power of thousands of computers to carry out the task while they are not being used.

A similar method was used by SETI to search for extraterrestrial life.

"We have upped the ante," Wessel van Rensburg of Lycos UK said.

He added: "We are serious about combating spam. There's a risk we will receive some denial-of-service attacks in the next few days, but we are ready."

According to researchers at Symantec, there was recently a huge spike in the number of spam emails being sent.

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