Spamonomics
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Bloody hell. No wonder there is so much spam. No wonder there is so little success in stopping the evil trade. No wonder criminal gangs have turned to creating and controlling spambots as an easier and less risky way to make money than trading in drugs or prostitutes. Just take a look at the economics of spam, or spamonics if you prefer.
US researchers working out of the University of California, Berkeley as well as UCSD, have revealed that all it takes for a spam operation to turn a profit is for one response in every 12.5 million spam mails sent to be returned. That bears repeating: a response rate of 1 for every 12.5 million spams distributed is enough to make a profit. Not just a ‘little over break even’ kind of bottom line, but millions of pounds a year in profit. Such is the scale that your average spamming business works to.
The researchers were able, effectively, to hijack an operational spam network in order to make the discovery. Over the course of a year, the seven researchers were able to closely monitor the workings of the infamous Storm botnet by creating a series of proxy bots to control just shy of 76,000 hijacked computers on the botnet. These were then used to route fake spam campaigns and analyse the results coming in to the fake pharmacy site they set up for the purpose.
Don’t panic, the team did not actually flog anything but instead idiot punters attracted by the spam were presented with an error message if they were stupid enough to get their credit cards out.
Apparently, the researchers sent a total of 469 million spam messages during a one month period, most of them looking to promote the fake pharmacy although some mimicked the way Storm attempts to infect user machines and assimilate them into the botnet collective.
The response, after 26 days, was actually less than 0.00001 percent. That is 28 sales from 350 million spam emails sent. Compare and contrast to a genuine direct mail campaign which would average around 2 percent conversion rate. Yet, the researchers say, this was enough to produce a revenue of around
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
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[…] if only idiots would stop buying stuff from the spam they do get, maybe we could kill this thing once and for all. Not yet rated […]
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 8:05 am
It was a very nice idea! Just wanna say thank you for the information you have shared. Just continue writing this kind of post. I will be your loyal reader. Thanks again.
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