Spammers are making profit even though they are only
getting one response for every 12.5 million e-mails they send,
researchers who hacked into the infamousStorm spam networkhave
found.
The
spam study was carried out by computer scientists from
University of California Berkeley and University of California San
Diego.
For the month-long study the computer scientists infiltrated the
Storm network, which uses hijacked home computers as relays for
junk mail.
At its height, Storm is believed to have had more than one
million machines under its control.
The researchers created several "proxy bots" on the Storm
network to send out their own spam.
The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869
hijacked machines on the network and routed their own fake spam
campaigns through them.
Linked to the spam e-mails they sent out, the team created a
legitimate looking pharmacy site selling "male enhancement herbal
remedies".
The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's
real owners, but it always returned an error message when potential
buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.
The researchers sent about 350 million email messages over 26
days, which resulted in only 28 sales.
The response rate for the campaign was less than 0.00001%.
Direct mail campaigns aim for 2.15%.
Even though the experiment saw a poor conversion rate, the
researchers said that by sending out many more messages, the owners
of the Storm network could be earning £4,500 a day, or £1.6m a
year.