The Lycos Inc. website that offers visitors a downloadable screensaver to use as a get-even tool against spammers was hacked on Wednesday.

Avid Computerworld reader Dylan Reeve of Auckland wrote in to say that the makelovenotspam.com site was showing the message "using bots to attack people is just wrong" in the browser title bar, and "Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn"t be doing it. Your ip address and request has been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action."

The site was inaccessible for many users for several hours but later returned to normal.

The Lycos screen saver is a program that will connect to spammer"s websites and consume their bandwidth. Each screen saver instance uses up some 3.4MB a day of bandwidth and thus drives up the costs for spammers.