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Sending Spam E-Mail Is Fast-Track to Riches, Study Reveals

by Tim Stevens on November 11, 2008 at 08:02 AM

How Spammers Profit
If you're anything like us, you get dozens and dozens of spams per day. If you have multiple e-mail accounts, that's a lot of spam and, when you think of everyone else you know, that's an awful lot of unwanted messages. It certainly seems like spamming can't be worth all the effort and that spammers couldn't possibly make any money from it, right? Well, they certainly do, and a group of researchers have just released a study showing how, which amazingly indicates that one click among 12.5 million e-mails sent is enough for spammers to turn a profit.

Students at the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego all participated in the research, using a variant of the Storm Worm to set up their own zombie network -- purely for research purposes, of course. They had control of 75,869 machines to send out 469 million spam messages, all pointing to a fake pharmacy site that raised an error when users entered their credit cards. From all those messages, the researchers got 28 attempted "sales," which they figured would equate to about $7,000 per day in proceeds for those who run the full Storm network. Not mountains of cash by any means, but quite a steady stream of money when there's not a lot of work involved. [From: BBC News]

Tags: e-mail scams, E-mailScams, security, spam, spammer, storm, storm network, storm worm, StormNetwork, StormWorm, studies

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