Lycos Europe launched the screensaver with the goal of fighting back against spam using hacker-like tactics. The tool uses idle computers to flood sites blacklisted for abusing spamming rules with requests.

Netcraft said Thursday that monitoring of three of the screensaver's targets, housed on Chinese servers, show that the bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz sites had been knocked offline by the attacks. A third site, rxmedherbals.info had remained mostly available, with some outages.

The new approach to fighting spam has been called the first time the principle of distributed computing has been used against antisocial behavior online. Critics of the MakeLoveNotSpam project question the ethical and legal legitimacy of using distributed denial of service attacks as a tactic, but other users are encouraged by the tool's potential to actually do damage to the problematic spammers.

Lycos Europe has reportedly denied rumors that the MakeLoveNotSpam site had been hacked and defaced, calling the reports a hoax. A security breach would be a big concern for a service controlling the capacity to launch a DDoS attack.