Читать книгу Security Engineering - Ross Anderson - Страница 47

Spamming arrived on a small scale when the Internet opened to the public in the mid-1990s, and by 2000 we saw the Earthlink spammer making millions from sending phishing lures. By 2010 spam was costing the world's ISPs and tech companies about $1bn a year in countermeasures, but it earned its operators perhaps one percent of that. The main beneficiaries may have been webmail services such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, which can operate better spam filters because of scale; during the 2010s, hundreds of millions of people switched to using their services.

Spam is now a highly specialised business, as getting past modern spam filters requires a whole toolbox of constantly-changing tricks. If you want to use spam to install ransomware, you're better off paying an existing service than trying to learn it all from scratch. Some spam involves industrial-scale email compromise, which can be expensive for the victim; some $350m was knocked off the $4.8bn price at which Yahoo was sold to Verizon after a bulk compromise [772].