The Web site of anti-spyware researcher Ben Edelman was knocked offline by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack earlier this week, a move Edelman attributed to spyware backers.

Edelman, a Ph.D. candidate and law student at Harvard, runs a Web site that posts news of spyware as well as his own research into the malware. The site was knocked out Monday and Tuesday, as well as several hours last week, by a DoS attack that his hosting company said was the biggest they'd ever seen.

DoS attacks flood an IP address with phony requests, enough to slow down or even crash a server so that it's unavailable to most, if not all, Internet users. DoS attacks have been launched against the likes of Microsoft and the SCO Group, whose site was offline for most of a month in 2004 after the MyDoom worm ordered infected PCs to target the California company's site.

At the height of the attack on Edelman, the site was bombarded by approximately 600 megabytes of bogus traffic per second, he said.

"I've recently written about increasingly controversial online schemes -- from installations through security holes to spyware companies deleting each other to programs that set affiliate cookies to claim commissions they haven't fairly earned," wrote Edelman on his site as he detailed the DoS attack. "These aren't nice practices, so I suppose it comes as no surprise that someone -- perhaps some group or company that doesn't like what I'm writing -- has sought to knock my site offline."

Although the attacks continue, Edelman said, he was up and running Wednesday morning, thanks to the help of the non-profit Internet Systems Consortium, which is now hosting his site.