News story: Study shows how spammers cash in
Researchers at the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego campuses) ran their own spam campaign (but without actually selling people anything or stealing any personal information) to study spammers' return on investment.
The researchers concluded that spammer profit margins are small enough that disrupting their networks could interfere with their business viability. In this case, the researchers hacked into the spam network but didn't interfere with its operation. Presumably, their technique could have been used to disrupt it instead, by blocking traffic to zombie PCs.
Perhaps they could even inject messages to alert owners of those PCs that their machines had been compromised.
Researchers at the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego campuses) ran their own spam campaign (but without actually selling people anything or stealing any personal information) to study spammers' return on investment.
Those 28 foolish people are costing everyone else a lot of time and expense.
The researchers concluded that spammer profit margins are small enough that disrupting their networks could interfere with their business viability. In this case, the researchers hacked into the spam network but didn't interfere with its operation. Presumably, their technique could have been used to disrupt it instead, by blocking traffic to zombie PCs.
Perhaps they could even inject messages to alert owners of those PCs that their machines had been compromised.
