Interesting statistic of the day...

[xthread]

From Bruce Schneier's article in Forbes about why we're stuck with spam so long as the underlying economics remain the same, the following interesting piece of information:

A 30-second prime-time television television ad costs 1.8 cents per adult viewer; a full-page color magazine ad about 0.9 cents per reader. A highway billboard costs 0.21 cents per car. Direct mail is the most expensive, at over 50 cents per third-class letter mailed... Typically, spammers charge less than a hundredth of a cent per recipient. And that number is what spamming houses charge their customers to deliver spam; if you're a clever hacker, you can build your own spam network for much less money.

Comments

[evilcyber.livejournal.com]

Bruce touches on some things, but misses a few key points. He gets close with "if you're a clever hacker...". The thing is, most bot nets these days are leased to spammers.

Let me repeat:
Script kiddies are building huge botnets and selling them to spammers.

White list mechanisms, tarpits, computationally expensive mechanisms are all greatly diminished when the spam is shotgunned out from 100,000 machines.


Unfortunately, I have no solutions, but I advocate the Russian approach.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I know that he's aware of it, I think he was editing (or possibly even editED) that out of the Forbes article simply because it would be hard to explain to the expected audience.