SC World Congress: Anatomy of a spam business

In less than nine months in 2007 a botnet-driven spammer network earned $7.5 million for its operators. The team consisted primarily of New Zealand brothers Shane and Lance Atkinson, who are now in federal court after being sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deceptive and fraudulent practices.

At a presentation Wednesday at the SC World Congress in New York, called “Web security and malware: Threats, causes and solutions,” Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology at Cisco's IronPort Systems, and Steve Wernikoff, staff attorney with the FTC in Chicago, outlined a study on how botnet affiliates work.

Typically, an operation works like this: A marketer builds up a group of affiliates that run spam botnets, the panelists said. The incentive is money – say 40 percent of all orders placed by spam victims. Often, the marketers grow their affiliate team by placing an ad on a site frequented by potential affiliates that are looking for products with which to scam potential victims. Some of the ads placed by the marketers essentially state that “You send the spam, we'll take care of everything else – billing, fulfillment, credit card charges, back-end communications, etc.”

Wernikoff said the attraction of the business includes the near-zero cost of entering and maintaining the business.

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News 1 year ago