Analysis of spam marketing conversion
I’m sure you have heard a statement along the lines that says spam is profitable. The reason usually given is because spam still exists despite the improvements in anti-spam technology. The spammers keep finding new ways to get around the anti-spam technology so it must be profitable. Have you ever seen any real research and numbers to support this theory? This study attempts to show just that. How many users actually are fooled and make a purchase from a spam e-mail in their inbox and is it actually profitable. In the study they actually manipulated the architecture of the storm botnet; specifically the proxy nodes and hijacked them to conduct the study. They created an inline program that swapped C&C, template and spam data before it was transmitted to the storm ‘worker’ nodes.
They were able to count who downloaded versus actually clicked on the software that would infect a user with the storm botnet. Other data included number of targets, number of MTAs that accepted the spam, number of users that visited a site by selecting the link, time it took for a user to receive the e-mail then become infected, and response rates per country.
It is obvious a great deal of time, thought and technical effort was put into this research. It would be exciting to be a part of something like this.
