Spamalytics

Well, here is a piece of interesting research that actually made it to the BBC website today. You will find the original research paper here.

During 26 days, researchers at UCSD sent over 350M spam emails by hijacking a net of spammer's machines. The spam emails directed to customers to a fake pharmacy site that made a note of the sale (without taking any money, of course) and then displayed an error page. According to the researchers, the only way research spammers is to be a spammer.

And the result of their 350M junk mail message, just a meager 28 sales. This equates to a hit rate of 0.00001% - far below previous estimates. Although even at this hit rate, it is estimated that the spammers could make up to $2M per year. I wonder how much money the IT industry spends preventing the majority of this spam reaching it's intended destination? Probably a bit more than the $2M the spammers earn.