Leader: Lycos must have seen it coming...

In the least surprising news of the week we reported this morning that Lycos has been hit with what looks like a cyberattack, just hours after launching a service which would enable denial-of-service attacks to be targeted at websites which advertise products in spam email.

Lycos' motivation was revenge - "hitting the spammers where it hurts".

As we commented yesterday, the initiative effectively turns the very guns wielded by the spammers - a network of machines launching co-ordinated attacks - back on them.

But of course if you enter into any fight you have to be prepared to trade blows and accept that the fire won't be one-way traffic (to use a very appropriate word).

While spammers have control of their own network - which is unquestionably more sizeable than Lycos' own grid effort - they will use it. Trojan-spread worms have handed the spammers a vast network of compromised machines and given them the ability to send huge volumes of spam email through open relays.

They can also, if they chose, launch crippling denial of service attacks against websites... like, say, Lycos for example.

And that is exactly what appears to have happened - we assume to no little surprise for those within the company who surely saw this one coming.

In truth the clamour to download the service, which will be popular among consumers, probably already had the system under some strain. Several attempts by silicon.com to access the download site yesterday, prior to word of this attack, failed. It won't have taken much to push it over the edge.

The question now is whether Lycos has the bottle to dust itself down and wade back into this particular fight. Having made its mark and announced its intention it now has to weigh up the pros and cons of continuing this battle.

The spammers certainly have the means and doubtless the inclination to inflict a lot more harm on Lycos.

Watch this space.