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Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post)
The Washington Post covers
an interesting research project which involved taking over parts of the
Storm Worm botnet to send out specially modified spam. It looks like a
sort of white-hat phishing expedition. "According to their research,
about ten percent of those who clicked on the link designed to spread the
malware ended up running and installing the malware. Again, extrapolating
out from their limited access to the Storm botnet, the researchers
concluded: 'By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation
campaigns can produce between 3,500 and 8,500 new bots per day.'"
The full
paper is available.
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Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post) Posted Nov 7, 2008 19:06 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
This is very cool research! The executive summary is that a bit less than 1 in 10M spams sent result in a sale (to the Pharmacy website).
Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post) Posted Nov 7, 2008 21:50 UTC (Fri) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
Yup, very interesting. I think the 3.5 million is actually much bigger, and the researchers admit that.
But I guess that the summed profits of the spammers are much bellow the summed losses of all the internet users: time waisted sorting the messages that pass, researchers efforts that could go into other more useful fields, the electrical energy consumption, network slowdowns and, maybe, the lost mails that don't pass the filter. I don't know if I ultimately lost any valid message, but I did lose a lot of time with people that did not receive my message the first time and vice-versa.
Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post) Posted Nov 8, 2008 19:00 UTC (Sat) by jrigg (subscriber, #30848) [Link]
Not to mention the waste associated with storage of email headers for a few years by ISPs, which is already a legal requirement in some EU countries. When you consider the proportion of total email traffic that is spam, these schemes are almost a total waste.
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