News breakdown - spammers retaliate against Lycos, phishing traps galore, & Kazaa in trouble

SearchSecurity.com has a nice rundown of some recent news all wrapped up in one article, which is here. Here are the headlines and some blurbs:

Here's a great idea that the spammers couldn't stand (the site is being fixed up currently) -

Retaliation for Lycos' spam assault

Lycos launched its "Make Love, Not Spam" campaign Tuesday by offering users a screensaver that launches distributed denial-of-service attacks on spammers' Web sites. The company said the screensaver uses the idle processing power of a computer to slow down the response times from those sites. Within hours of the makelovenotspam.com site being launched, Silicon.com reported that the original front page was replaced with a simple message: "Yes, attacking spammers is wrong. You know this, you shouldn't be doing it..."

Microsoft is going after spammers as well -

Microsoft sues alleged CAN-SPAM violators

No doubt you've seen phishing attempts in your junkmail box, but they're all over the web as well -

Phishing traps litter Google, other search engines
They look like legitimate e-commerce Web sites, but they're really phishing traps...Phishers typically lure victims to malicious Web sites by sending official-looking e-mails that appear to be from reputable companies asking users to verify their user names and passwords. Many are now setting up legitimate looking e-commerce sites that hide links to malware as pictures of goods on sale, CyberGuard told CNET News.com. Paul Henry, a senior vice president at CyberGuard, said instead of linking to pictures of the advertised product, the links point to a self-extracting .zip file that installs a Trojan horse on the victim's computer. The program could then steal personal and financial information.

Things aren't look up for Kazaa in their Australian trial -

New developments in Kazaa trial
Tom Mizzone, vice president of data services at New York-based MediaSentry, told the Sydney court his company is able to identify Australian users of Kazaa software by tracking the IP address. He said the IP addresses allocated for Internet service providers in Australia can be traced through the "scanners" his company uses to track down sound recordings and user information within the Kazaa system. He added that MediaSentry is also able to detect the copyright-infringing music files made available for download in the Kazaa system's shared folders. Mizzone told the court his company is doing what any ordinary user of the Kazaa system is able to do.
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Mizzone's statement is critical to the music industry's claim that Sharman Networks can use the Kazaa software to identify people who are downloading copyright-infringing materials and communicate with them at the same time, CNET News.com reported. Sharman Networks and other respondents in the trial have maintained they can't control what Kazaa users do with the software...