Phishing Is a Minimum-Wage Job

rohitm918 writes "A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): '...low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.' They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. 'Even though it harvests "free money," phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'"

So that's what they do...

[Garridan]

I always wondered what the remaining 5% of computer science majors did, who didn't end up working minimum wage jobs at McBurger Queen...

No more phish!

[Notabadguy]

Everyone knows that if you overphish a stream, there's no phish left for everyone else. Its a classic case of resource depletion!

Crime doesn't pay

[ecloud]

...and neither does farming!

(slogan I saw on a baseball cap as a kid, maybe 25 years ago. One of my grandpa's buddies was wearing it.)

Re:FP?

[Anthony_Cargile]

Yes, you have the first post, but edit your hosts file to point slashdot.org to 69.16.232.239, then log in with your username and password and comment for yet another first post! I promise it'll be worth your while, just like your twitter [access-login.com] is!

And in case your browser does not stop you, do NOT [slashdot.org] actually log in to the access-login page above, unless you drool and make funny noises. And the IP used for the hosts file joke was random and does not VHost-phish slashdot.org. Disclaimers suck, don't they?

Re:No more phish!

[Anonymous Coward]

people should learn... there's plenty of jobs as pharmers and phlorists... or even phirephighters

Having taken Econ 101...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And thus being a perfect master of all questions of human economic activity(except for currency related theory, which is why I'm just going to parrot gold-standard talking points until we get to that chapter next semester in Econ 102) I have a solution!

Clearly, since phishing shows the classic signs of being a tragedy of the commons(if I were serious, I would put a patronizing link to the wikipedia article I had read just moments before in this spot) we must divide up the world's computer using idiots and make individual blocks of them the property of particular phishers, thus aligning incentives and ensuring optimal exploitation of the Lusers. I call all AOL usernames that start with "a"!

Re:Yeah, Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the 419 examples you requested, but I need $3000 to get them through customs.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:So that's what they do...

[morgan_greywolf]

Hey! I'm an insensitive clod who makes fun of people who happen to stock shelves for a living, you insensitive clod!

Re:Having taken Econ 101...

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap, you get [e-mail]... thats the biggest idiot with the most money...

Re:Bit off-topic

[Farmer Tim]

Perhaps were raided by the BSA for using unlicensed copies of Acrobat Distiller.

Hey, a man can dream...

Re:FP?

[SleepyHappyDoc]

Increasing effort is a sign of failure, according to the summary.

Re:Irrational expepctation

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up! It's actually hard to put a finger on it; however this feeling of "I'm doing it wrong" when confronted with a well-to-do con-man is quite hard to shake off.

Give them a bailout

[hodet]

Poor phishers