On 2012/06/22 14:23, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
On 6/22/2012 3:13 PM, John Hardin wrote:
Not sure if everybody's seen this yet:
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf
Some discussion here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/06/far-fetched_sca.html
It's certainly interesting but it's a hard document to swallow. They
purposefully try and make their pool lower by making the scam so stupid that
anyone who falls for it is clearly a good mark?
My anecdotal research combines more with low-paid labor who simply follow what
has worked combined with massive inequities in scales of economy that I don't
see well reflected in this research.
Regards,
KAM
Nigerian spam is an industry in Nigeria (and other places, I presume.)
It is all little operators. These operators spit out their spams. The
ones who hit the right formula survive and teach the next generation.
The others fail. We have a genetic algorithm in action.
They never performed the analysis we see in the Microsoft paper. They
simply evolved into a strategy that works. They are also continually
refining it through this evolution process.
{^_^}
