Storage bills top $43,000 say Spam-busters

Beverley Head
Thursday, 18 August 2011 09:53

Business IT - Security

Curtin University's Anti-Spam Research Lab has calculated Spam 2.0 - found on blogs, wikis and social networks - could be costing large organisations $43,000 a year just to provide the additional storage capacity mopped up by Spam content. The Lab is now finalising patents which it hopes will allow the release of a new breed of anti-Spam tool later this year.

Researchers at the Lab have recently written a paper which details an experiment which saw it establish a fake pharmacy website, and then plant Spam on a number of forums and blogs in an attempt to drive traffic to the website and work out how much money Spammers were making. (The experiment first sought and received approval from the University's ethics body).

Pedram Hayati one of the Lab's co-founders said; 'We designed the ad and posted on web sites and blogs. We targeted 70,000 websites in a month and put in about 7,000 spam messages, so 10 per cent of the websites were vulnerable.

'We had 2,000 visitors come and visit the web site and three people tried to make purchases.

'The business model on the Spam side is based on the click-through rate and using the model of $1 per click we would have made $2,056. This amount depends on the keyword and the link - but we understand the click-through rates vary between 20 cents and the maximum can go to $1.50.'

Mr Hayati claimed though that the problem is much bigger with some companies experiencing; '12 million spam ads a day - so that's $370,000 a month.'

Dr Vidy Potdar, head of the Lab, told iTWire that the Lab was now working on a second experiment to try and determine the infrastructure costs associated with Spam.