Sun, 11/16/2008 - 12:19
Researchers Take Over Storm Botnet To Study How Spam Works A group of researchers have taken over a spam network to understand how junk mailing and the results were rather startling. The team of computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) infiltrated the Storm network over a period of four weeks and took control of more than 75,000 zombie PCs, mostly home computers. These were then used to send spam emails pointing to a purpose-built fake pharmaceutical online store complete with pseudo-Viagras and other similar products. Only one out of every 12.5 million emails sent out converted into a lead. Out of the 350 million messages sent over 26 days, 28 sales were made at an average cost of $100 each. That's a conversion rate of less than 0.00001 cent - around 10,000 less than what you would expect from a legitimate mail. By extrapolating that number to the estimated size of the Storm network, they worked out that spamming could generate at least £2.3 million per annum (or in other words, 35,000 victims). Before destroying the part of Storm they controlled, the researchers also ran a fake spam campaign that aimed at testing the way Storm acquires new Zombie computers, through malware dissemination by sending nearly 123 million email's The research actually shows a number of interesting things. Firstly, it is easy enough for computer researchers to hijack part of Storm, why didn't they take it down altogether? Secondly, it remains to be seen whether, even as researchers, what they did was legal as they did not ask for the user's permission before spamming their inboxes and thirdly, it shows that the average web user is properly protected (using tools like web filters) and knows when an email is spammy or not. Lastly, business must be booming as profits after operating costs must be small enough to make spamming interesting for these criminals.
Desire Athow | 10 Nov. 2008
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Spammers profit from one in every 12.5m peopleTiny conversion rate enough to turn a profit
Oliver Garnham | November 10, 2008
Researchers who infiltrated the Storm spam network have calculated that those sending unsolicited emails can make a profit by attracting just one sale from every 12.5 million spam emails.
Scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) hijacked part of the Storm network earlier this year for a month-long period, saying in a report (download PDF) outlining their findings that "the best way to measure spam is to be a spammer".
They used the network to send spam campaigns from a network of over 75,000 compromised machines. Despite sending almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted - a conversion rate of well under 0.00001 percent.
However, the researchers said that their study used only a small fraction of the overall Storm network. "We estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm's pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 [per day]."
The report says that despite the tiny conversion rates, over the course of a year the Storm botnet could produce around $2.5m in revenue.
The researchers acknowledged that the figure was less than the "millions of dollars every day" that had previously been attributed to the Storm botnet network, but remained "a healthy enterprise".
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Scum Spammers, they're worse than Bankers, Lawyers and Politicians. There is a "Special" place in hell for them and if there is no hell one will be created just for them. They can stay their with others of their type, you know child molesters and what not.
