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Researchers Hijack Storm Worm To Track Profits
An anonymous reader points out a story in the Washington Post, which begins:
"A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam. Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam."
The academic paper (PDF) is also available. We've previously discussed another group of researchers who were able to infiltrate the botnet for a different purpose.
How come they don't track down the IP addresses of infected computers and inform the users their computer is compromised? It seems these researchers also are getting a kick out of the botnet at the cost of the victims.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that people are migrating from small provider companies to big internet provider companies - and their e-mail is going together. And it also seems to me that all those big companies have good e-mail filters (or they're getting one that will be good in a small period of time). If that's true, spam will face a dead end pretty soon.
Even if you stay with a small provider company with your personal e-mail, there are many good solutions to avoid spam. I used Popfile for a long time and it worked pretty well.
Either way, if people will go to their spam box and click that viagra ad, it will be their problem. It doesn't affect me anymore.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I realize this will either be wildly popular with you or you'll hate it, but what I'd like to see someone do is infiltrate the botnet somehow (either by vulnerability or crack their key or whatever) and send a command to the herd to zero the boot sector and shut down their host. (the zombies, not the herder's machines)
Nothing enough to cause data loss, but enough to force the naive owners to take their machines to someone to get them fixed/cleaned up. I'm tired of being a victim of computer neglect en masse.
Not saying there's just one botnet out there, so I'd be greatly entertained to see them fall one by one. Should make a nice spectacle. Wouldn't it be entertaining to get up tomorrow and read front page stories all over the place the likes of which we got with Code Red, that a sizeable chunk of zombies just dropped off the grid and there were long lines at the PC repair shops this morning? Stories of entire businesses being brought to a halt because 95% of the machines in their office were owned? Sorry, but "serves them right", and thank you have a nice day while I go check my mail and see 80% fewer medications for sale.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
A single response in 12 million emails ? So someone orders $50 of 'GetHard' or whatever.
Then introduce micropayments on all emails. $50/12,000,000 or about 0.5 millicents an email. No normal operation would suffer, and spammers can't make a profit. Job done.
Actually, I'd rather they be made to pick up a piece of litter for every spam email they sent, or some other such public service that equates piece for piece to the amount of spam they have sent.
Repaint a house for someone = 100 spam messages
Clean up a city block of litter = 100 spam messages
Well you get the point. Force them to wear bright yellow spandex jumpsuits with the spam logo on it until they have fully atoned.
Whatever the punishment, it should be public, and only mildly degrading.
Something that lets us all remember what they did, and what it costs in reparations.
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