Researchers Outline Spammers' Business Ecosystem

An anonymous reader writes A team of researchers at the UC Santa Barbara and RWTH Aachen presented new findings on the relationship of spam actors [abstract; full paper here] at the ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security. This presents the first end-to-end analysis of the spam delivery ecosystem including: harvesters crawl the web and compile email lists, botmasters infect and operate botnets, and spammers rent botnets and buy email lists to run spam campaigns. Their results suggest that spammers develop a type of "customer loyalty"; spammers likely purchase preferred resources from actors that have "proven" themselves in the past. Previous work examined the market economy of the email address market in preparatory work: 1 million email addresses were offered on the examined forum for anywhere ranging between 20 and 40 Euros.

Correct link to the full paper

[dskoll]

The full link above does not work, but this one works for me [acm.org]

Re:Correct link to the full paper

[Anonymous Coward]

The corrected link also didn't work for me, but I can fetch the PDF from this site (also linked above): https://dl.acm.org/citation.cf... [acm.org]