Tagging the Storm Worm to Track Spam Profits

by Jordan Yerman | November 8, 2008 at 10:41 am

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During the spring of this year, UCSD and Cal Berkeley researchers infiltrated the Storm Worm botnet and tracked its intra-botnet traffic as instructions were sent to the tens of thousands of infected computers that do the spammers' dirty work. The researchers then impersonated the online shops to which the spam links in order to guage the actual commerce- and profit- generated by the botnet responsible for 20% of the world's spam.

A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam.

The hit-rate was very low, but the hardware costs are borne by the infected machines, so the profit to spammers is nearly 100%.

After 26 days, the Storm worm sent 350 million e-mails advertising the researchers' counterfeit pharmacy sites. Only 28 would-be sales resulted, and all but one of the potential clients ordered male enhancement drugs.