We aren’t sure who it is that still reads spam, let alone makes purchases from it, but please stop.
According to Ars Technica, a security researcher from Sophos names Dmitry Samosseiko did some sleuthing, and was able to find his way into the administrative backend of a spamming network. What he discovered was that there is still big money being made from spam emails, and the conclusion is that so long as people continue to purchase Viagra and other drugs via these emails, we will all suffer.
In a lengthy report (PDF link), Mr. Samosseiko details how the one spam network he got into has about 30 sales a day, totaling up to $4,000. $1,600 of that goes to the spam software generator, a group named GlavMed, while the rest goes to the person using the spam bots. In other words, GlavMed makes around $584,000 a year from spam, and this is just one of possibly many spam networks set up by them.
The latest iteration of spam seems to be centered on Russians setting up the networks to sell the drugs that come out of Canadian pharmacies. While there is no way to know for sure, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that this is tied in with the Russian mob, but that is purely speculation on my own part.
It is amazing to me that there are still people even reading their spam emails after the endless warnings that have been made by security groups over the dangers of even opening these emails, let alone clicking on any links in them. You are opening yourself up to viruses, Trojan horses, identity theft and any other slew of nastiness by even reading this junk mail.
The other problem is that you are subjecting everyone else on the Internet to continue receiving them because even a small percentage of them work. It costs next to nothing to send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails, so why should the spammers care if only 30 a day result in a sale? The only way for this to end is for everyone to just stop looking at them, but somehow I doubt that will ever happen.
Maybe we need a new slogan, something like, “Every time you read a spam email, God kills a kitten”. Think that would finally get the point across?
