private message spam

[stannard67]

Our WyoDebate account received some spam as a private message:

Hi, WyoDebate!

I see you want to promote your website. More effective, for less price...
It's easy ;) . *XRumer 5.0 Palladium is a software pack, which can post to more than 1.000.000 forums, blogs, guestbooks, BBS's, boards, etc.*

It's price was grow up to $540, and continues growing.
Just use Google for purchase XRumer.

P.S. Do not use XRumer 2.9 and XRumer 3.0 - it is too old and buggy versions.


This is more an FYI for Patrick than a complaint per se. I know these things happen.

matt

[patio11]

Thanks for the heads up. I think someone has recently created a bot to do that. I'll see if I can't find a better way to deal with it than just playing whack-a-mole on their accounts.

[stannard67]

Thanks Patrick.

Why would someone waste time and money creating spambots? For whom are spambots effective advertising tools?

[skibum]

Another quick suggestion: rename the "cumes" forum - it seems to attract all of the spam messages to the board, and I think we all unfortunately understand why (most folks don't see the spam messages because the software usually automatically moderates them - but all the admins and mods do see them - and I suspect renaming that one forum may reduce the number of bots that target this site).

J

[patio11]

Done Jake. Don't know if that will work or not, but thank you for the suggestion.

[skibum]

I don't know how much (if) it will help at all - but it's one of those "can't hurt to try" things. We'll only be able to tell if the auto-moderated threads/users start showing up somewhere else, or nearly disappear - let's hope for the latter.

J

[mdreher]

Thanks Patrick.

Why would someone waste time and money creating spambots? For whom are spambots effective advertising tools?

Matt,
You'd be amazed. Two people at UC-San Diego and UC-Berkeley tried to figure out how much revenue spambots generate. Their study's conclusions:


After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28
sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of
these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average
purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions
would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over
$100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods
when the campaign was active. However, our study interposed
on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate
roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we
proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy
campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods
of campaign activity). By the same logic, we estimate that Storm
self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and 8500
new bots per day.
Under the assumption that our measurements are representative
over time (an admittedly dangerous assumption when dealing with
such small samples), we can extrapolate that, were it sent continuously
at the same rate, Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam
would produce roughly 3.5 million dollars of revenue in a year.
This number could be even higher if spam-advertised pharmacies
experience repeat business. A bit less than “millions of dollars every
day”, but certainly a healthy enterprise.


Reference: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/CCS08Conversion.pdf

Basically, the numbers are such that even if literally 99.9999% of people don't click on spam, the other .0001% still make it effective costwise. Such are the joys of the way email works on the internet...