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Are you one of the 25 in every 10 000 who actually fall for one of the vast range of offers sent out in the form of spam every day? Hopefully not. But unfortunately, there are still enough people who do so to allow this situation to continue. In 2011, there are signs that the global spam volume may be about to stabilise. A number of botnets, as they're known, have been shut down, and this is because of better filters, mainly from the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Our own knowledge of what we should delete and what we should keep is also improving, making life harder for professional spammers. However, there are still vast amounts of money to be made in the spam industry, and if you're one of the people who goes on about how stupid and unprofessional the spammers are, you might have to think again. I've tried to calculate how much money is made by the spammers from our stupidity, and if you read on you'll see that there's every reason – financially – for spammers to continue to disrupt us with their spam for a long time to come. Data researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego carried out unique study of the spam industry in 2008. To measure the effectiveness of spam and the options available for earning money, they launched a fictitious professional spam operation. They set up a fake website selling Viagra and other products to alleviate male impotence. To achieve full effect and force in their study, they infiltrated and used professional spam software, a botnet known as "Storm". A view of the unknown "storm" was achieved when 85 000 computers were hijacked. Of these, 35 000 were prepared to send spam. By way of comparison, we can look at a botnet by the name of Srizbi which had 315 000 hijacked computers and the potential to send out 60 billion spam mails per day. "Storm" is a major botnet which was discovered in early 2007 and has hijacked an unknown number of computers (estimated vary from 20 000 to more than a million) and copied their address books. Researchers were able to get hold of and use a small part of this botnet to spread their fake website. The researchers on the study used Storm for 26 days and over that period sent out 350 million emails in which they marketed their potency agents and online pharmacy. Of the 350 million emails sent, they were able to remove 82.7 million due to invalid addresses and "blacklists" (email recipients which had blacklisted these senders previously). Spam filters further reduced the number, but exactly how much is difficult to gauge as they don't send information back. Of the emails that were delivered to people's Inboxes, 10 522 people clicked on the link and visited the fake pharmacy. Of these, 28 people made purchases amount to $100 on average. At this point, the researchers returned an error message instead of a purchase so that they wouldn't find out the real addresses and card details of the buyers. All in all, this gave a daily income of... Follow this link to read the full article: http://comaround.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/spam-study-%E2%80%93-25-out-of-every-10-000-spam-mails-lead-to-sales/ http://comaround.wordpress.com/ http://comaround.com/ http://www.comaroundfree.com/
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Spam study, spam, spam mails, emails, botnet, ComAround, ISP, fake website, Storm, network, spamfilters, spam industry, 2011,
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