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Re: [Asrg] Spam profitability analysis and countermeasures

2007-04-25 10:39:25
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sam bledsoe wrote:

[Quoting from]
    http://mrmoe.net/~samble/spamthing/spam_profitability.odt

| One click per spam [per spam recipient] could destabilize spammers'
| business models, upsetting their clients' cash flow, and leading to an
| end to the economic viability of the practice.

You assume that spammers use their own bandwidth for web hosting, which
is rare -- quite (most?) often, they use someone else's infrastructure:

* Hosting on a botnet, so all that would be achieved is saturating an
(not-so) innocent bystander (zombie owner and it's ISP), but not causing
direct economic disincentive to the spammer.

* Hosting on an abused website. Again, this will negatively affect the
rightful owner and it's ISP.

* Hosting on a server rented by the spammer - often with fake credit
card data or other fraudulent tactics. This will at best impact the ISP,
but not cause cost for the spammer.


Any kind of (d)DoS attack on a spamvertized host may decrease that
particular hosts' lifespan, because it is detected and cleaned sooner
than it would be without DoS. This may drive up a spammer's cost
slightly because he has to rotate the landing hosts faster, but given
the wide availability of such spam-hosting resources, I would not expect
a noticeable effect.

Further, given that botnets can be in the tens of thousands of members,
it's easy for the botnet operator to initiate counter-attacks if the
number, "click-rate" and aggregated bandwidth of spam-recipients does
not outnumber the botnet operator's resources by an order of a magnitude.

- -- Matthias
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