Spray gives away free screensaver that DDoSes spam-sites

Spray.se, a Swedish portal, search engine, internet place to hang and the second widest used free email host has begun a new campaign to attract more Spray users.

The evil geniuses at Starring have put together a campaign that doubles as a DDos attack. Seriously.

Banners on all large Swedish site declare: "Make love not Spam" and take people to spray.se/makelovenotspam where punters can download a screensaver. The screensaver 'visits' (hits) well-known spam sites whenever it's in use. Sites that sell dildos, porn and Vigra are targeted. The more people that download and use the screensaver, the more often these sites will be 'hit', creating the effect that the targeted sites will be very slow to surf as their servers work overtime to answer all requests.

"We don't make it so that any of the sites crash, we just slow them down and make them difficult to surf. With more people using the screensavers, the slower their sites gets, and then we hope they might understand that it's just not worth using Spam as they do." Said Calle Sjönell to Resumé.

update: Info on the campaign site states that the servers chosen as potential targets for the screensaver are handpicked from several blacklists, and verified by hand before being distributed to the clients (the screensavers). To distribute the load that is generated by so many screen saver clients the domains are picked by a round-robin algorythm where load, respons times and other factors are weighed in - everything to avoid an actual DDos. The screenserver works by only generating https requests (POST and GET randomly). Hat tip to the friendly Bold forum friends for clarifying that for me.

The people involved on this project were Creative Director Calle Sjönell, Account Exec Åsa Marklund, programmer Robert Carlqvist, Art Directors Didde Brockman, Andreas Köster and Anton Stén, Copywriters Magnus Jacobsson and Fredrik Lundgren and Flash programmer Linus Nicklasson. The banners in the campaign can be viewed on Starrings homepage.