The odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 700,000.

A spammers response to those odds would be to throw a party and buy a gold plated Rolls Royce.

How many spam emails have you ever bought something from? My guess is zero. A new study from the University of California showed that the spam emails they sent out converted an average of once every 12.5 million emails. For ever spam email that converted this year, 17.8 people got struck by lightning.

And yet spamming keeps going on, and can be quite profitable. The spam company hijacked by the UC, Storm, generates an estimated $7,000 a day from millions of spam emails, which works out to $3.5 million a year.

How does this work? Storm sends out malware emails that infect a large number of “worker bots” that do their work for them, using other computers to send out spam without overworking their own servers. So the overhead isn’t very big: it’s just a matter of infecting and putting out enough volume to make up for the incredibly low success rate.

One of the interesting tidbits of info from the study: The USA, Japan, and Taiwan offered up the fewest positive responses to spam while India, Pakistan, and Bulgaria were far more likely to be pulled in by it. Of the two types of spam tested, one for a pharmaceutical company and one that tricks the user into installing Storm’s malware by downloading a fake e-card, Americans fell much more strongly for the self-propagating email that created Storm’s army of bots. France fell especially “hard” for the pharmaceutical ads.

It is getting a little tougher to hack computers and trigger the self-propagating mechanism that allows Storm and other spam companies like it to keep costs down. Combined with the low success rate, this may be enough to curb the supply of spam soon.

I almost never get it in my inbox anyway. Besides the occasional Nigerian prince, I’m relatively spam free these days.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 4:31 pmand is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.