Hi guys, I worked with Julie in writing this article. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the work. I was indeed inspired by the Drake equation in coming up with this interpretation of our results :)
Was this a technically difficult operation to undertake? How long did it take to plan and execute? i'm assuming that it's not that tedious of a task to scale and automate.
In going through this exercise were you able to come up with ideas to combat spam more effectively?
I never understood why email servers never adopted something like the 3-way-handshake, which ultimately would increase the bandwidth and processing power required per email. It would theoretically make bot-nets easier to find and protect against. However, I admittedly don't know much about the industry, so there's probably a simple answer.
Short explanation: network effects and backwards compatibility.
When the SMTP protocol was designed/evolved, spam and other malicious uses did not exist. They didn't even exist for many, many years afterwards.
When the spam really became a problem, everyone was already using smtp and switching the whole world to an alternative wasn't (and still isn't) possible.
Designing email protocol that would eliminate spam is not hard if you start with such goal in mind.
The people who designed smtp were very smart (it is being used decades later), but they were pioneers and unsurprisingly didn't anticipate all of the consequences. When they were designing it, there number of people using the system were in thousands. I doubt anyone in early eighties was anticipating the magnitude of smtp's success and the abuses of the system only became profitable when email started being used by millions.
"Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000."
That's great, but gives me absolutely no context to answer the actual question, "How much do spammers rake in." Is 7K high, low or average for a spammer? What's the total revenue of all spammers? How many spammers are there? What is a spammer- an organization of 10, 20, 100 people, or is it one guy?
I'm more interested in ad-spam than this kind of botnet fraud spam.
For instance, if I built a twitter bot replying to anyone saying "iPad" with a link, then the page at the end of that link was absolutely filled with ads. How much money would I make?
It seems to be a somewhat viable method of getting some cash because you see a lot of those bots around.
So they assume 90.7% of messages get caught by spam filters.
Apparently they send out around 1 billion emails, 23.8% of which gets delivered. Around 2600 people read the emails, and a quarter of them will an average of $100.
[+] [-] Udo|15 years ago|reply
It's the Drake equation for spam! $7000/day is not too shabby, either...
[+] [-] waitwhatwhoa|15 years ago|reply
If you'd like to learn more about this experiment, the Wired article is based off of: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/CACMSpam09.pdf
[+] [-] jamesshamenski|15 years ago|reply
In going through this exercise were you able to come up with ideas to combat spam more effectively?
[+] [-] lsc|15 years ago|reply
Not that I have any idea how to educate those sorts.
[+] [-] jemka|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjksf|15 years ago|reply
When the SMTP protocol was designed/evolved, spam and other malicious uses did not exist. They didn't even exist for many, many years afterwards.
When the spam really became a problem, everyone was already using smtp and switching the whole world to an alternative wasn't (and still isn't) possible.
Designing email protocol that would eliminate spam is not hard if you start with such goal in mind.
The people who designed smtp were very smart (it is being used decades later), but they were pioneers and unsurprisingly didn't anticipate all of the consequences. When they were designing it, there number of people using the system were in thousands. I doubt anyone in early eighties was anticipating the magnitude of smtp's success and the abuses of the system only became profitable when email started being used by millions.
[+] [-] kooshball|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|15 years ago|reply
That's great, but gives me absolutely no context to answer the actual question, "How much do spammers rake in." Is 7K high, low or average for a spammer? What's the total revenue of all spammers? How many spammers are there? What is a spammer- an organization of 10, 20, 100 people, or is it one guy?
[+] [-] ique|15 years ago|reply
For instance, if I built a twitter bot replying to anyone saying "iPad" with a link, then the page at the end of that link was absolutely filled with ads. How much money would I make?
It seems to be a somewhat viable method of getting some cash because you see a lot of those bots around.
[+] [-] light3|15 years ago|reply
So they assume 90.7% of messages get caught by spam filters.
Apparently they send out around 1 billion emails, 23.8% of which gets delivered. Around 2600 people read the emails, and a quarter of them will an average of $100.
[+] [-] aidscholar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brendino|15 years ago|reply