Do you feel lucky?
Yan Shoshitaishvili, Luca Invernizzi, Adam Doupé, Giovanni Vigna · 2014
A crucial part of a cyber-criminal's job is to balance the risks and rewards of his every action. For example, an expert spammer will tune a bot's email-sending rate to achieve a good throughput with an acceptable risk of being detected. Then, such a cyber-criminal has to choose how to launder the money he made with spamming, and he will have to consider many options (money mules, Bitcoin, etc.) that will offer different returns and risks. Although understanding these trade-offs and coming as close as possible to their optimum is what discriminates winners and losers in the cyber-crime world, there has been little study on this matter, as setting up a large-scale study to study how cyber-criminals deal with these risk-reward trade-offs is challenging.