Dec 8 2004
The story of the failed
"Make LOVE not SPAM" campaign launched by Lycos-Europe, search engine giant Lycos' European counterpart, has no shortage of irony. The MakeLOVEnotSPAM screensaver was designed to take advantage of idle computer time to send multiple GET requests to spammer websites, thus slowing down their operations in what many viewed as an illegal Distributed Denial of Service attack. Adding insult to irony, malware authors have released a Trojan that masquerades as the Lycos infamous MakeLOVEnotSPAM screensaver.
Dubbed TrojanDropper.FakeSpamFighter by F-Secure and Troj/Mdrop-IT by Sophos, the Trojan is designed to log keystrokes and send the collected data to an email address in Indonesia.
TrojanDropper.FakeSpamFighter a.k.a. Troj/Mdrop-IT was first discovered on December 6, 2004 having been transmitted via an email with the subject line "Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen saver". The TrojanDropper.FakeSpamFighter a.k.a. Troj/Mdrop-IT email carried an attachment named "Lycos screensaver to fight spam.zip".
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