PCs act as conduits
for vast spam networks

By effectively "hacking" an existing spam network, researchers unearthed the "economics" of being an email spammer, reports the BBC.

Here's the secret: high volume and a virally-expanding network, which means even the tiniest response rate can produce millions of dollars in profit per year.

Computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego conducted a month-long study of the Storm Network, a spam operation that hijacks home computers to relay junk mail. At its peak, Storm could have used over one million machines simultaneously as conduits for spam.

Under the premise that "the best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," researchers created "proxy bots" — vessels that relay data between Storm's dashboard and the hijacked PCs, which send out the junk mail. In toto, 75,869 machines were used to rotate spam campaigns over the course of the study.

To gauge how well junk mail converts, a pharmacy site was invented where users could "buy" an herbal remedy to enhance their sexual capabilities. (They received an error message upon pushing a button to submit credit card details.)

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," researchers found, a total response rate of less than 0.00001%. (Legitimate direct mail operations typically glean a response rate of 2.15%.)

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88 — a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period."

Scaled for Storm's girth, the actual spam network is estimated to be netting about $7000 per day — over $2 million per year.