Internet portal Lycos Europe has denied that its "Make love not spam" Web site was hacked into and defaced last night.
The company said that an e-mail that contained an apparent mirror image of the Web site being hacked was a hoax generated by spammers.
"This is a hoax," said Malte Pollmann, director of communication services for Lycos Europe. "We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers, we don"t have any logs of an attack. No one was able to verify that."
Despite the company"s assertions, the site was inaccessible for most of Wednesday, according to Internet analysis firm Netcraft.
Lycos Europe is a separate company from the Web portal that bears the Lycos name in the United States. Lycos Europe claims that it maintains roughly 40 million e-mail accounts across eight European countries.