A study of more than a million spam emails has revealed a weak link in the junk email business. It shows that the web links contained in many spam messages point to just a handful of servers. So, in theory, disabling or blocking these servers could help make spamming a less profitable business.
Instead of focusing on filtering or blocking spam at the inbox, Geoff Voelker and Chris Fleizach at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) examined the infrastructure behind spam instead.
The pair studied more than a million spam messages, collected over a single week in 2006, which advertised 2334 distinct companies, ranging from businesses selling legal products to financial scamming sites.
The messages came from a wide range of sources, most likely PCs infected with a computer virus and remotely used to churn out spam (see Web browsers are new frontline in internet war). But when the UCSD team followed web links in each spam message, they found that 94% directed traffic to a single web server. Furthermore, 57% led to a single host based in the US.
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An even better option would be to follow the billing trail and actually arrest this scum.