Changing Times for Sam the Spammer

Here are some tidbits from one personal account. There is no way to know if it represents spammers as a larger body. Reliable statistics are hard to find, as apparently no one checked the, "I send spam email for a living" box on the last census.

Back in the day Sam brought in good money. From the mid 90's up until 2000 he made six figures peddling junk online. Most of his email made it to people's inboxes as spam filtering software hadn't come into large scale distribution. He also had less competition. Even the most heavily spammed inboxes usually only received a few dozen unwanted messages daily.

For the last few years things have been on a downward trend. Now, most of his email gets blocked by programs for filtering email. Many users aren't aware how much spam is actually blocked. Their own software may show, "only" a few hundred messages killed each day, but in reality their ISP may have intercepted several hundred more before being delivered to their POP server.

Sam has had to resume his day job and send junk email at night. But, on a positive note for Sam, he now has a new trick to make money.

Spam zombies are the latest advancement in sending junk email. Worms, trojans, viruses and other malware compromise systems in such a way that a spammer can install email sending software on them. Then, from a remote location, the computer can be triggered to participate in a spam sending campaign. Often, from dozens to thousands of computers are used simultaneously to send the messages. These larger networks of zombie systems are called, "botnets." The largest botnets may be composed of several hundred thousand systems; a staggering amount of computing power. Their distributed nature allows them to be impervious to some efforts to prevent spam email from reaching its destination such as DNS blacklists.

Ultimately, hackers are behind zombies and botnets. They write the software performs the exploitation, whether they hack an individual system by hand or not. The new phenomenon here is that spam messages have made hacking is as much for profit is as it is for fun.

But Sam isn't so interested in using spam zombies himself. He brokers lists of spam zombies. The list of IP addresses can then be used by other spammers to send their advertising. He manages to make several thousand dollars each month doing this. Not as good as his heydays of spamming, but money is money.

Some zombie systems may strategically announce themselves to would be abusers. Other zombie software have to be, "discovered" by scanning for active ports on possibly compromised systems.

But, Sam avoids doing the dirty work of locating zombies himself. He gets the addresses from any number of sources. Sometimes he purchases lists from others in the industry, and sometimes he collects the lists off free websites. He then, "scrubs" the list by checking each address to verify it's still active.

This practice isn't without precedent. Spammers and other shady figures have in the past and continue to use, "proxy servers" and "open (SMTP) relays" to send email and perform various other tasks online without risking having their own accounts shutdown.

Using spam zombies is pretty clearly illegal, however brokering lists of zombies seems to be in the grey area of the law. Imagine someone selling a list of homes with faulty locks. It's certainly unethical, but plausibly legal.

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