Jedi Star

After the plug wall pulled on the Web Hosting firm McColo in the US. This was after 4 months of investigation by Washington Post newspaper. The major clients of this firm were gangs running spam botnets.

Due to this move the spam traffic has gone down by 70%, but this would be a temporary slump for the gangs until they find a new network to move to.

The data that was collected on the Web Hosting Firm was passed on to the ISP’s of McColo, which led to the internet service providers Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric to pull the plug on this company.

The gangs which were hosted with the Web Hosting firm were running botnhets- whic basically are computers which are like zombies which are taken over by the spammers who send malicious software and spam.

As the US industry is pulling its socks up to fight and secure its network more and more gangs are looking for networks outside US where policies are less stringent.

However this will only make the spammers more cautious while making their moves henceforth.

However lets try and enjoy the spam free mailboxes while we can.

Posted under Latest News

Ever wondered what do people get out of spams, the answer is money and lots of it. Recent Studies show that even after getting response to one out of every 12.5 emails sent spammers are making profit from Spams.

A US group recently hacked into a working spam network and found out how the economic works for a Junk Mailer or spammer. Spammers make millions of pound out of every Spam Operation they run.

The Study was carried out on the Storm Network that hijacks Home Computers as relays for emails. And it is believed that at its peak Storm Network had one million machines under it control.

And as quoted by the researchers, “The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer.”

The test was carried out for 26 days and after sending 350 million e-mail messages it resulted in only 28 sales, which is a response rate of less than 0.00001%.

The Total revenue estimated from these 28 sales is about $2,731.88 or around $100 a day for the measurement period.

So now if you calculate the Storm Network revenue it turns out to be $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) per year.

However the researchers also revealed that the profits have gone down considerably for spammers over the last few year and this might lead to new ways of spamming which will be more economical for the spammers to run.

Posted under Latest News