Monetizing spambot activity and understanding its relation with spambot traffic features

A myriad of studies are reporting an exponential increase in the number and size of worldwide botnets [1, 2, 15, 17, 20, 21]. For instance, it has been reported that the Storm botnet increased by a factor of three during the second quarter of 2008. The reason of such exponential growth is the financial gain that these spam botnets can generate [1, 2, 3]. Absent grounded empirical data, it is challenging to reconcile "revenue estimates" that can range from $2M/day for one spam botnet [4]. Paxson et. al [1] have documented 82,000 and 37,00 monthly orders for seven counterfeit pharmacies and counterfeit software stores, respectively. The spammers running all these spams generally purchase time from a bot master to launch a spam campaign with a single objective to increase their respective profit margins from such spam campaigns.