End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain

DaMadHatter · May 22, 2011

Spam
Researchers want to spoil the spam merchants business
Spam Ranking: The nine most common types of spam

Nearly 80 percent of the world sent e-mails are unsolicited junk mail. Provider combat the flood of mail filtering software, now U.S. researchers have an idea for a fundamental solution - they want to start with the banks that handle the spam business.

That was a lot of work: For three months, a research team of Californian and Swedish universities using self-developed software analyzes unwanted advertising mail. The researchers looked at, among other things, to which reference sites, the spam messages, what goods were offered there, and one of which network the advertised online stores. They have also bought from supplier to supplier advertised goods determined (fake watches, software and medication) and then the countries of origin and the payment service provider.

The result of the just-published study: the advertised goods are a handful of spam classified networks. The division of labor provides the study, as a rule like this: the junk mail to send very different people, but they work on commission for far fewer suppliers. The settlement of the purchase, payment and delivery of the advertised goods take a few networks.

Banks in St. Kitts and Azerbaijan

The researchers have given up 76 test orders. The credit card payments transacted a handful of banks. A bank on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts who received the payments for most herbal sexual enhancer and watches imitations, two banks in Azerbaijan and Lithuania were working off the credit card statements for drugs that credit card payments for software were delivered to banks in Russia.

In the multiple orders of the three banks researchers have completed 95 percent of the payments. The scientists suspect that this concentration corresponds to the actual distribution in the sample: "There are thousands of banks, but the number of those actually carrying out high-risk transactions is far lower." Four months after the first test orders, researchers have once again bought a few products advertised in spam messages. Results: Almost all the networks developed payments through the same banks.

From these observations, the researchers deduce that the banks, the scarcest commodity in the value chain from the spam-earners.

The idea of â€‹â€‹scientists to fight spam: the card-issuing banks in the West to withhold payment for certain transactions where the recipient banks "are known as supporters of spam-advertised products." Such black lists based on fewer test purchases could be created and updated quickly. For many goods advertised via spam (drugs, counterfeit, pirated) could there be a legal basis for such black lists, suggest the researchers.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/Oakland11.pdf

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End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain

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