Instead of trying to keep our inbox clean from spam, we should stop payment so that spammers do not receive any income according to security researchers from several universities in California.
To stop junk mail (spam) through filters and policing against botnets is ineffective in the long run according to IT security researchers from several universities in California, which together examined alternative methods to combat the spammers.
Instead of trying to keep inboxes clean through various techniques and measures should efforts be focused on stopping the payments, so that the junk e-mails will no longer provide any income for the spammers. In the scientific report Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain, will report the researchers how this trick could prove to be much more effective than traditional anti-spam techniques. The full process is explained in this picture from the report:
The report also reveals that only a small number of banks willing to process what the industry calls “high-risk transactions.” In fact, the three banks, which exist in Azerbaijan, Denmark and the West Indian island of Nevis, together accounting for 95 percent of the payment transactions for goods that spammers advertise.
If the U.S. credit card issuing banks, for example refused to carry out transactions that banks identified as supportive of the spam articles, so then the underlying business economics dramatically eroded, say the researchers.
Opportunities are also available through various methods to update blacklist transactions in a timely manner, which further contributes to this tactic is worth trying, say the researchers.
The full report and analysis available on USCD Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
This should also be applicable not just to email spam, but also to blog and forum spam too. For blog and forums spam we have to also get around the problem with pagerank, because that’s also driving this type of spam. But luckily it doesn’t matter if they get high pagerank in search engines if they can’t sell the stuff 😉
Do you think the banks will act, or are they so happy to earn money from these transaction that they will continue?
