As we go forward each year we want to see if some of these circumvention technologies become more like appliances and you just plug them in and they work," he added. "It's hard to quantify how many people are doing this. Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, said the organisation was also looking at the tools people used to circumvent filtering. The researchers concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meagre enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defences.The report said net censorship was spreading across the globe They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers. While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past. BBC NEWS TECHNOLOGY FULLScaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year. "Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88-a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations. The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign. While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido. Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. The research team created a legitimate looking pharmacy site. The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them. They created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail. "The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work. The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study. The spam study was carried out in early 2008 by computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD).įor their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.Īt its height Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control. It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail. The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year. Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.īy hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer. A tiny response means spammers still cash in (PA)
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