From: TechRadar.com —
A new, rather unconventional, study by computer scientists at University of California (UC) Berkeley and San Diego has revealed some interesting facts about e-mail spam.
If you think you get a lot of spams, you’re right. And there’s a good reason. The UC researchers found that only about one in 12.5 million spam e-mails evokes a response from recipients — so spammers have to pump put gazillions of spams to make any serious money.
As TechRadar.com’s Adam Hartley reports, “The study … infiltrated the Storm network, which uses hijacked home PCs to relay much of the junk email you spend your days wading through.â€
The study revealed that the Storm network had more than 1 million home and office computers under its control at one point, though that number is dropping as individual and corporate computer users become more security-smart.
The UC study involved over 75,000 Storm network-controlled computers and sent more than 350 million fake spams over 26 days, advertising a fake Internet pharmacy and a fake herbal male enhancement preparation. After all that, only 28 recipients attempted to buy the product.
Nevertheless, researchers calculated that a spam network the size of Storm could net operators as much as (US)$7,000 per day, or more than (US)$3.5 million per year.