>There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
>There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.
People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI voice changers, it even sounds like them.
This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
>There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.