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Phishing Is a Minimum-Wage Job

Posted by kdawson on from the triumph-of-the-commons dept.

rohitm918 writes "A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): '...low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.' They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. 'Even though it harvests "free money," phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'"

4 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. So that's what they do... by Garridan · · Score: 5, Funny

    I always wondered what the remaining 5% of computer science majors did, who didn't end up working minimum wage jobs at McBurger Queen...

  2. No more phish! by Notabadguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone knows that if you overphish a stream, there's no phish left for everyone else. Its a classic case of resource depletion!

    1. Re:No more phish! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      people should learn... there's plenty of jobs as pharmers and phlorists... or even phirephighters

  3. Re:FP? by Anthony_Cargile · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yes, you have the first post, but edit your hosts file to point slashdot.org to 69.16.232.239, then log in with your username and password and comment for yet another first post! I promise it'll be worth your while, just like your twitter is!

    And in case your browser does not stop you, do NOT actually log in to the access-login page above, unless you drool and make funny noises. And the IP used for the hosts file joke was random and does not VHost-phish slashdot.org. Disclaimers suck, don't they?