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.
Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam.
"Thus, the total daily
revenue attributed to Storm's pharmacy campaign is likely closer to
$7,000 or $9,500 during periods of campaign activity." Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam
would produce roughly $3.5 million dollars of revenue a year," the team
concluded.
According to their research, about ten percent of those who clicked
on the link designed to spread the malware ended up running and
installing the malware. A copy of the academic paper is available here (PDF).