

Measuring spam conversion rates by infiltrating the Storm botnet - jsomers
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf

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codeismightier
For the lazy: "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28
sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but
one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was
close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in
revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140
per day for periods when the campaign was active. However, our study
interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate
roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the
total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy campaign is likely closer
to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity). By the same logic, we
estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and
8500 new bots per day.

The next obvious question is, “How much of this revenue is profit”? Here
things are even murkier. First, we must consider how much of the gross revenue
is actually recovered on a sale. Assuming the pharmacy campaign drives traffic
to an affiliate program (and there are very strong anecdotal reasons to
believe this is so) then the gross revenue is likely split between the
affiliate and the program (a annual net revenue of $1.75M using our previous
estimate). Next, we must subtract business costs. These include a number of
incidental expenses (domain registration, bullet-proof hosting fees, etc) that
are basically fixed sunk costs, and the cost to distribute the spam itself."

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cowmoo
Yes. That's about right but I am afraid that the lazy's are gonna miss out on
the intricate command & control hierarchy of a botnet and how the researchers
injected their machines within the command & control channel to effectively
control a portion of the botnet. I am quite surprised about the level of
sophistication these botnets are - well ... I guess that programmers in Russia
are smarter than their U.S counterparts.

The only thing that we should be weary of (or some of us happy about) is the
fact that with this paper, somebody could go ahead and employ the botnet to do
their evil bidding instead of the botnet's owner's original evil bidding. Talk
about what comes around goes around!

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josefresco
Russian programmers are not smarter, they're just willing to do things like
this without feeling like they're the scum-of-the-earth like most Americans
would.

In Russia they don't believe in black/white, right/wrong like we do here in
America, there's about an 80% gray area in between which means things like
SPAM, Botnets and taking money from suckers is acceptable (notice I didn't say
right or wrong)

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asdflkj
Actually, they believe strongly in black/white and right/wrong in Russia, but
within a tighter social circle. This difference between Russia and the West is
of degree, not of kind. Most Americans care little about how their actions
affect people in the third world, for example.

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netcan
I wonder how this jolly industry settled on its limited range of products.

The spammers are infinitely creative in creating new ways to say 'penis
enlargement,' but they can't think past selling one of about three products?.

~~~
jgrahamc
Penis enlargement products are ideal for spam because they are embarrassing to
buy elsewhere, they are very cheap to manufacture (e.g. sugar pill) and they
don't work. The last part is important, if they did work there would be a non-
spam market for them.

For this reason, I believe that we do not see hair loss products marketed
extensively through spam. There are good hair loss products (minoxidil and
propecia) that have clinically shown effects.

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snewe
Cool findings:

\- Hotmail didn't let any spam through \- one campaign had 347,590,389 emails,
10,522 visits and 28 conversions (paper: "However, a very low conversion rate
does not necessary imply low revenue or proﬁtability.")

~~~
tlrobinson
Hotmail also doesn't let a lot of legitimate email through...

