Storm spammers make $3.5m per year

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Nov 2008 at 08:44

Spammers only need to get one response for every 12.5 million emails they send out in order to become millionaires, according to a new study.

Over the course of a month US researchers hijacked a portion of the Storm botnet, which at his height was using around one million machines to send out spam emails, claiming that "the best way to measure spam is to be a spammer".

The team took control of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam through them. The spam directed people to a fake pharmacy website, offering them cheap drugs including Viagra. However, anybody who actually clicked the buy button found themselves confronted with an error message.

The researchers claim to have sent nearly 469 million spam emails, but the response rate was less than 0.00001%. According to the scientists, legitimate organisations report rates closer to 2.15%.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers in the report.

Even recording such low numbers, the researchers revealed that a spammer could still turn a tidy profit: "Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88-a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period."

Utilising the full Storm botnet, at a potential expense of around $80 per million messages, the report claims spammers are likely earning around $7,000 a day, possibly turning revenues of around $3.5 million.