While researching today's story about crafty phishing techniques, I came across some statistics that reveal the lifespan of various types of nefarious Internet schemes. The chart below, put together by Milcord, a company that collects real-time data about botnets, shows that spammers survive for a couple of months, while phishers typically make it only about five to ten days. Malware schemes are in between.

The chart shows the respective lifespans of botnets engaged in phishing, spam, and malware distribution. The data is for botnets that use a trick called flux to extend their lifespans. Credit: Milcord

What's the reason for this time difference?

Alper Caglayan, Milcord's president, thinks it's due to the nature of the victim. "Phishing targets well-known brands, like Citibank, Bank of America, eBay, or Paypal," he says. "Obviously, these folks are willing to spend a lot of money defending their brands."

Though ordinary people are the ones who ultimately get burned, phishers can affect the reputations of companies with deep pockets. Caglayan says that some security companies offer service-level agreements that promise to get a phishing site hosted in the U.S. taken down in under an hour.

Spam, on the other hand, has no such highly-motivated opponents. While it's a nuisance to everyone, no particular company suffers publicly for it, and therefore, the money to halt it simply isn't there.

Most individuals may want someone to do something about spam, but they end up relying on anti-virus software or intervention from law-enforcement agencies.The motivation to go after and shut down the botnets just isn't the same.

Now we know what gang war will look like in cyberspace. It doesn't much resemble the Jets and the Sharks. It looks more like you and me.

A new study found that 90 percent of all e-mail sent is spam--and most of that is sent out by criminal gang members and other unsavory characters who are hacking into personal computers and using them as "e-mail zombies." From the Reuters story:

About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails, according to Spamhaus, a body that tracks the problem. Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails.

These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

How bad is this problem? Well, anyone who has ever opened his or her e-mail account after a long holiday weekend can attest that it's bad. However, a story in the Times found that as many as 150,000 English citizens have unknowingly had their computer used to send out spam.

And all of that can be traced back to one man, according to the Times story:

Amichai Inbar, identified as the world's fifth most significant spammer, has been using a London-based internet company to control the networks of hijacked computers, The Times has discovered. He is responsible for billions of e-mails advertising pornography, drugs such as Viagra and offers of "cheap" shares that turn out to be virtually worthless.

The recent revelations have caused an uproar at the European Union headquarters, in Brussels. Leaders are calling for new spam laws to be strictly enforced across all territories, including the United States, which is purportedly the worst at controlling spammers, according to this Associated Press story.