I was just reading about this interesting study on Mashable that I thought would interest everybody. I get a ton of spam a day even with spam filters and most of it makes me wonder “who the hells falls for this crap.” Turns out that the BBC did a piece on a study by some scientists at the University of California Berkeley & San Diego. These scientists studies a spam network called the “Storm network” that used hijacked home computers to send out spam. The Storm network was estimated to be one million machines strong at one point in time. Imagine 1 million computers sending you spam…
Turns out that spammers only get about 1 response for every 12.5 MILLION spam emails they send out. That is a 0.00001% response rate. I want to meet this one person… The Storm network seems to have ignored the low response rate since they were still raking in about $2 million a year!
Damn B@$+@R&S!
Read the full writeup at the BBC or check out the summary by Adam @ Mashable
DavidB Not Registered
Posted: November 12, 2008 at 10:42 AM EST
You know, I had to ask when reading all the coverage of this, if these researchers could take over part of Storm like this, why can’t some “white hat” hackers take over the whole thing and just shut it down? I mean, really, if they could get in, why not??? Sure would be the Philanthropic thing to do….