On the Spam Campaign Trail

Over the last decade, unsolicited bulk email, or spam, has transitioned from a minor nuisance to a major scourge, adversely affecting virtually every Internet user. Industry estimates suggest that the total daily volume of spam now exceeds 120 billion messages per day [10]; even if the actual figure is 10 times smaller, this means thousands of unwanted messages annually for every Internet user on the planet. Moreover, spam is used not only to shill for cheap pharmaceuticals, but has also become the de facto delivery mechanism for a range of criminal endeavors, including phishing, securities manipulation, identity theft and malware distribution. This problem has spawned a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry that in turn drives spammers to ever greater sophistication and scale. Today, even a single spam campaign may target hundreds of millions of email addresses, sent in turn via hundreds of thousands of compromised “bot” hosts, with polymorphic “message templates” carefully crafted to evade widely used filters. However, while there is a considerable body of research focused on spam from the recipient’s point of view, we understand considerably less about the sender’s perspective: how spammers test, target, distribute and deliver a large spam campaign in practice. At the heart of this discrepancy is the limited vantage point available to most research efforts. While it is straightforward to collect individual spam messages at a site (e.g., via a “spam trap”), short of infiltrating a spammer organization it is difficult to observe a campaign being orchestrated in its full measure. We believe ours is the first study to approach the problem from this direction. In this paper, we explore a new methodology— distribution infiltration—for measuring spam campaigns from the inside. This approach is motivated by the observation that as spammers have migrated from open relays and open proxies to more complex malware-based “botnet” email distribution, they have unavoidably opened their infrastructure to outside observation. By hooking into a botnet’s command-and-control (C&C) protocol, one can infiltrate a spammer’s distribution platform and measure spam campaigns as they occur. In particular, we present an initial analysis of spam campaigns conducted by the well-known Storm botnet, based on data we captured by infiltrating its distribution platform. We first look at the system components used to support spam campaigns. These include a work queue model for distributing load across the botnet, a modular campaign framework, a template language for introducing per-message polymorphism, delivery feedback for target list pruning, per-bot address harvesting for acquiring new targets, and special test campaigns and email accounts used to validate that new spam templates can bypass filters. We then also look at the dynamics of how such campaigns unfold. We analyze the address lists to characterize the targeting of different campaigns, delivery failure rates (a metric of address list “quality”), and estimated total campaign sizes as extrapolated from a set of samples. From these estimates, one such campaign— focused on perpetuating the botnet itself—spewed email to around 400 million email addresses during a threeweek period.