Spamming Becoming Financially Infeasible

itwbennett writes "Making money in spam isn't as easy as it used to be. 'It's not something financially feasible for anyone to even consider,' said Robert Soloway, who in his heyday made $20,000/day as a spammer. 'Spam — the Internet's original sin — dropped for the first time ever at the end of 2010,' writes IDG News Service's Robert McMillan. 'In September, Cisco System's IronPort group was tracking 300 billion spam messages per day. By April, the volume had shrunk to 34 billion per day, a remarkable decline.' Soloway says spam filters have become too good."

Comments

I don’t buy it

[Anrego]

It may have hit a slump, but it’ll be back.

People en-masse haven’t gotten any smarter. There are still enough people who will fall for scams and do business with the kind of people who advertise via spam. Some good tech is currently making an effective barrier between the idiots and the spammers, but the idiots are still there, so the profitability is still there. Give the bad guys a little time. They’ll come up with new ways of getting around our current filters.

Of course the other theory is that spam has become “less interesting” in light of other new and exciting ways of screwing with people. Once those dry up though, I think the guys with the suits will fall back on classic reliable spam to make their money.

Re:I don’t buy it

[poetmatt]

it's humorous, but it's just a market change.

social engineering, and pfishing are probably a whole lot more "financially feasible", much more results for less effort.

I mean would profits from info gleaned via a SQL injection be really considered a "hack" these days if it was a script kiddie?

Re:I don’t buy it

[Moryath]

It's not that spamming is not lucrative. It's that they keep redefining the definition of "spam."

"Spam" back in the day? People trying to sell things. Sometimes legit, sometimes not. That kind of crap IS starting to die down now, though not as much as you might think. But to be legit you have to run your own servers, have your own IPs, and so you can be shut down rather quickly.

The new "Spam" is adding people to every fucking mailing list they can buy, and scraping for email addresses everywhere. "Business Papers: ERP, CRM, Phone Systems", and so on and so forth keep popping up. Advertising crap for various places trying to make a vacation destination of themselves. A lot of it filtering through linkfarms and pay-per-click referral sites that actually go to legit businesses.

And then there's the political crap, mostly from right-wing shit-for-brains groups like the Tea Tardiers, spamming out screeds about how "if you don't think what we think and hate those brownskinned people then Yer Not A Real Amurrikkan!" Stuff that doesn't look like the traditional "hey I'm selling viagra" spam, but still annoys the crap out of people who don't want it.

And then there's all the phishing crap, which they're not defining as "spam." That stuff runs on botnets.

Re:I don’t buy it

[rtfa-troll]

My theory is that the idiots are using Facebook, and to some extent other social/instant media so that's where the spam is moving. (not saying that all Facebook users are idiots, in fact some of my more friendly than not acquaintances are Facebook users, just saying that most idiots are Facebook users).

Re:I don’t buy it

[Ephemeriis]

People en-masse haven’t gotten any smarter.

People haven't gotten any smarter, but technology has.

Outlook has junk mail filtering built-in. Gmail has spam filtering built-in. Pretty much every mail server out there has some kind of spam filtering available. Pretty much every endpoint protection package has a spam filter. There are tons of different filtering systems available for purchase.

Relatively little spam actually makes it through to the user's inbox anymore. So there's less for the stupid/gullible folks to click on.

Give the bad guys a little time. They’ll come up with new ways of getting around our current filters.

Well, of course they will... But the good guys are going to keep developing new filters, too.

Of course the other theory is that spam has become “less interesting” in light of other new and exciting ways of screwing with people. Once those dry up though, I think the guys with the suits will fall back on classic reliable spam to make their money.

Spammers go wherever the market is. Right now the market is on the social networks. More people are communicating more often on things like Facebook than through simple SMTP. So there's less profit to be had in spamming SMTP servers.

Sure, if SMTP suddenly becomes crazy-popular again you'll see the spammers head back in that direction... But all our existing filters will still be there to curtail that crap.

the profitability is still there.

I don't know about that...

Sure, it's probably pretty cheap to send out a few thousand emails... But how many of those actually make it in front of somebody's eyes? And how many of those actually get read? And how many of those are actually clicked-on?

The real money these days is in malware. Dropping bots on computers and grabbing their credentials for various websites... Or sending out some kind of fake antivirus scanner that scares people into paying $50 to clean up the fake infection... Or using those bots to hack some big, important website...

I really don't know that there's all that much profit to be made in sending out spam these days.

Easier Ways

[Kamiza Ikioi]

It's not that they've gone legit. It's that there are easier ways to scam people out of their money for higher profit returns, such as spear-phishing.