economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)

[Victor.Duchovni at morganstanley.com]

On Mon, 12 May 2003, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> > The other side of this equation is what a second of CPU costs in
> > monetary terms to a spammer.  (To an end user it is essentially free
> > because his CPU is mostly idle anyway; the limiting factor for the
> > user is his preference for fast mail delivery (and in the dialup
> > case an unwillingness to sit waiting for tokens to be calcluated
> > before his mail can be sent).
>
> If you believe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2988209.stm,
> spammers are beginning to use viruses to deploy spam relays.
>

This started in Sep 2002, the first example was the JEEM trojan. I got two
emails via JEEMs just today, a few thousand JEEMs are listed at
list.dsbl.org.

The JEEM trojan installs an open SOCKS 5 proxy, an open HTTP proxy and and
open SMTP relay on three random looking TCP ports in the range 3000-9999.

Because the JEEM proxies lack access controls, they are relatively easy to
identify and blacklist. More advanced trojans could be invisible except to
authenticated spammers, it is hard to say whether these exist at this
time, but eventually they will.

I think that this delivery channel will remain popular primarily for
delivery of illicit content (offshore underage porn, etc.).

-- 
	Viktor.

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