Introduction

Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise's full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown).

In this project, our colleagues at UCSD and our team at ICSI conduct a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email — including naming, hosting, payment and fulfillment — using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organizations who administer them and then use this data to characterize the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. (Click for larger version. If you would like to use the diagram elsewhere, I would appreciate a quick note — thanks.)

We provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain: 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks. For details, take a look at the paper.

For a more in-depth analysis of spam conversion in one particular botnet, take a look at our earlier Spamalytics project.

Press

• Study Sees Credit Cards as a "Choke Point" for Spam, New York Times, 19 May 2011.
• Anatomy of a Spam Viagra Purchase , Technology Review, 20 May 2011.
• Researchers: Kill spam e-mails by choking off scammers' cash, Consumer Reports, 20 May 2011.
• Forscher wollen Händlern das Spam-Geschäft vermiesen, Spiegel Online, 21 May 2011.
• Spam-Bekämpfung soll bei Banken ansetzen, Heise Online, 22 May 2011.
• Secret to Stopping Spam: Follow the Money, Scientific American, 23 May 2011.
• Spammers and Their Bankers, New York Times, Editorial, 28 May 2011.
• Spam as a Business, Bruce Schneier, 9 June 2011.
• What's the Harm If I Get What I Pay For?, Messaging News, 16 June 2011.
• Ars Technica, BoingBoing, F-Secure, Slashdot, The Register.

Links

• Advertising material from Azerigazbank (AG Bank), the Azerbaijani bank that handled payment of over 60% of our purchases.

Related Publications

• Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain pdf bib

  K. Levchenko, A. Pitsillidis, N. Chachra, B. Enright, M. Felegyhazi, C. Grier, T. Halvorson, C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, H. Liu, D. McCoy, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, G. M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

• Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion pdf html bib 492 citations

  C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, K. Levchenko, B. Enright, G. Voelker, V. Paxson, and S. Savage. 15th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 27-31 October 2008, Alexandria, VA.