November 17, 2008
Make $2m a year by spamming
Well, so say researchers at the University of California. They ran a test to see just how much money they could make by running a controlled spam campaign. The brilliantly named Stefan Savage took control of over 75,000 hijacked machines from the Storm botnet and sent out 350 million email messages in 26 days. (Link)
From these messages a total of just 28 sales resulted, netting the “spammers” a little over $100 a day for the period. Extrapolating these figures to factor in the entire Storm botnet, Savage estimates that a spam-ring might make $2m a year. To me that seems quite reasonable but maybe not if spread over a huge team with large-scale resources.
The report says:
“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 response rate worked out at 0.00001% compared to 2% for a direct mail campaign. But, in spite of those figures, spam seems to be worthwhile to an awful lot of cyber criminals.
Breaking news… Breaking news… Breaking news… Breaking news…
News reaches us (literally just fifteen minutes ago at time of writing which makes me feel very CNN) that spam levels have dropped 70% since last Tuesday after two US internet service providers pulled the plug on hosting company McColo. (Link)
Jason Steer of Ironport says:
“It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny.”
However, given the relative anonymity of the Internet we should not expect this to last long.
“Spam levels will come back to normal as we build up to Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Ah, drat.
Did you hear there was an election a few weeks ago?
Now this is what we were talking about a few weeks back. While John McCain and the Republicans seemed pretty indifferent to the technology sector, Barack Obama is taking the bull by the hi-tech horns and appointing America’s first Chief Technology Officer. (Link)
With Vint Cerf and Bill Gates in the running, these are exciting times. The Obama campaign said:
“The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an inter-agency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers at each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.”
It all sounds a bit PR-ish. So what does Obama mean for technology? Obviously I don’t have a clue but thankfully vnunet.com does. And they wrote about it here.
Some of the points brought up about Obama were that he was the first presidential candidate to join MySpace, will make non-emergency bills available online for the American people to peruse and pass comment on and “establish the perfect democracy” by developing a national broadband plan.
I’m still kind of hung up on the thought of Barack Obama logging on to MySpace to remove invitations from scantily-clad models called Georgia and Dixie who want him to view their webcams.
Michelle Obama: “No, you can’t!”
Random thought
I wonder if the credit crunch would be as intimidating if the term used to describe it wasn’t so alliterative and onomatopoeic.
Bone-no
I’ve always wanted to be a rock star. Well, actually, not always. Clearly in my early years I was more driven by my desire to be an astronaut or just get my hands on the Jammie Dodgers. But, oddly, one rock star I’ve never aspired to be is the great humanitarian, Bono.
That was until I read about pictures circulating of him cavorting with two scantily-clad models (Georgia and Dixie?) on (band mate) The Edge’s yacht in St Tropez. And the IT link here? Well, the girls, who posted the photos on Facebook, didn’t set their privacy settings correctly, allowing everyone and their dog access. Sadly for Bono this included Mrs Bono (and maybe her dog too).
(Link)
Security firm Sophos have released an entertaining video detailing why it’s important to get privacy settings right on Facebook.
Seriously, that’s the only day I’ve ever wanted to be Bono.
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