A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.
The study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) infiltrated the Storm network, which uses hijacked home PCs to relay much of the junk email you spend your days wading through while wondering 'who the hell responds to this stuff?'
Well. Now you know. One gullible idiot in 12,500,000 recipients. Or thereabouts.
Spam the spammers
"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," claims the study. And they certainly picked the right network to hijack, with the Storm network having over one million machines under its control at one point.
Using 'proxy bots' the team of researchers managed to control 75,869 hijacked machines to conduct their own fake spam campaigns.
The researchers used two of the most popular ploys currently used by spammers – firstly offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering a herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido.
"After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted," says the research paper.
Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.
Both baffling and incredibly annoying, we're sure you will agree. For some actual useful and helpful information head over to TechRadar's recent 50 websites you will wonder how you lived without feature.
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
doctork
April 17th 2010
4. Only one heavy spammer was active before March 2010 in the world, with email account in all countries !
17 April 2010 : ukmall.net/blog - World email is spam free now with my SPAM THE SPAMMER crusade. I am grateful to British Prime minister and other governments, EXCEPT INDIA, for responding to my complaints and blessing me with this dream achievement. Last team effort by indian telecom companies to rescue THEIR hard disk harvester is still on. Else he is running short of service providers. Would the world be spam free now, despite LONE spammer being shielded by indian government?. Why is government shielding international terrorist? Is he BSNL chief? Is he a minister's son? Is he TRAI/DOT Chief's kin? EVERY indian telecom company has his form filled up with photograph.
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rickd335
November 11th 2008
3. What a bunch of **** - these guys admit to violating the law and will try to justify it based on the fact they were conducting research.
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ricklomas
November 10th 2008
2. Funnily enough I just had an email from a friend who emailed his entire address book, this was my response,
"Hi XXXXX,
[WARNING: UNEXPECTED BOLLOCKING FOLLOWS] Please don’t put my personal email cc’d to your entire address book ever again, if anyone of these people gets a worm type virus all the emails are f*cked with spam forever. Use BCC instead of CC.
Sorry mate it’s one of those things that really f*cks me off – unfortunately the email system isn’t quite like real mail. For example you wouldn’t send out a general card with 51 personal addresses on would you? I’m a bit hot on this from when I used to be an email spammer myself, in the day I’d email your 51 friends (+5 million other strangers) and try and sell them Insurance, access to porn sites or Viagra and then sell their addresses on to an email collector who would go way worse!!!!!!!!!! This is why people write those email collecting things. Like “send this to 50 of your mates in the next half hour or your kids will die” type emails or “support breastcancer678876ghjygj.ru” type things, they can log in to the account pick up all the emails and spam them…for ever.
So be cautious, apparently only 1 in 1.250.000 ever gets answered and buys something, but the average full time Russian Spammer earns $7000/day – maybe I’m pi$$ed off coz I never earned that much!
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kapauldo
November 10th 2008
1. (linkback) Believe or Doubt? Research: Spammers get 1 response per 13M emails [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/2f430
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