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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0278 Researchers Analyze Spam and Scams:
Computer Scientists from University of California San Diego have found striking differences between the infrastructures used to distribute spam and the infra- structure used to host the online scams advertised in these unwanted email messages. Using new Internet monitoring approaches developed at UCSD, the computer scientists studied a spam feed over the course of a week. They analyzed spam-advertised web servers hosting online scams that either offer merchandise and services (e.g., pharmaceuticals, luxury watches, mortgages) or use malicious means to defraud users (e.g., phishing, spyware, rootkits). The researchers followed the URLs embedded in spam back to the hosting servers, probed the servers and analyzed the web pages advertised in the spam. They found, while hundreds or thousands of compromised computers may be used to relay spam to users, individual web servers host most scams. The computer scientists also found that more than half of the scam servers identified in the live spam feed were in the United States, 14% in Western Europe and 13% in Asia. This finding is particularly interesting given that only about 14% of spam relays used to send spam to the feed used in this study were located in the United States, while 28% of the spam relays were located in Western Europe and 16% in Asia. The researchers believe the strong bias of locating scam hosts in the United States suggests that geographic location is more important to scammers than spammers.
(University of California San Diego 06AUG07)