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

[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.

This has been the strategy for a while

[hedwards]

People have been working on increasing the cost and decreasing the reward from spamming for some time now. From discouraging people from buying from spam messages to grey listing, to shutting down botnets, all of that has been largely for the purposes of making it less attractive to spam.

I'm just a bit surprised that it's starting to have an effect, it's hard to compete with basically free server capacity and bandwidth.

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.

Depends on your definition

[wcrowe]

It depends on your definition of "spam". By my definition, I get more spam than ever. The difference is that much of it is from legit companies who comply with the CAN-SPAM law. I can opt out, but I'm getting about 100 or more of them a day, and I can't spend all day opting out of every single one of them. It may be legal, but it's still spam, as far as I'm concerned.

Big corps have stopped tolerating spam

[Medievalist]

Aren't most of the spam kings either dead, retired, or in jail at this point? I hear it's lonely in Boca Raton these days.

And wasn't there a wave of murders in the former Soviet Union when Microsoft and Time-Warner/AOL decided they were no longer going to ignore spammers? Bunch of free-lance software developers with connections to organized crime found dead, as I recall; the rumor was that the spam kings were eliminating people who knew too much.

Well, regardless of the truth or falsehood of any of these tales and rumors, if corporate pressure has made spamming unprofitable, I'm certainly not complaining. It's about time the f***ing invisible hand did something besides j***ng off US Congressmen.