Researchers Outline Spammers' Business Ecosystem 14
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.
Re:I'm surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
Spam has shifted gears. Before, it was mainly advertising and "chop your dollar" scams. Now, I mainly see phishing attempts either to get people to give up data or to go to a site that would attempt a large number of exploits (even trying to offer bogus "securityscan.apk" files on Android.) This isn't surprising because getting a victim's computer on a botnet is far more lucrative for a spammer than actually getting them to buy some pills or fall for yet another 419 scam.