Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers

Architecture and Background

Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spam Grant Jordan WiseCrack Tools Every time you look at your inbox, there it is... SPAM! Your penis needs enlargement, a horny single girl from Russia "accidentally" emailed you, and a former Nigerian prince knows that you're just the man to safeguard his millions.

Vulnerability Analysis

But in 2007, while still a student at MIT, one particular kind caught my eye: stock spam. Those bizarre stock market "tips" that claim you should buy a particular stock because it's "about to go through the roof!!!!" Like most people, I initially thought nothing of these ridiculous emails. That was until Kyle Vogt (now of Justin.tv) proposed the stupidest idea I had ever heard: "There has to be some way we can make money off these spammers".

Exploitation and Demonstrations

After trying, and failing, to prove Kyle wrong, the two of us embarked on a 4-month study into the dark depths of stock spam. In this talk, I'll explain how we went from hand-sorting tens of thousands of spam emails to developing a trading strategy able to take a piece of the spammers' profits. And how, in the process, our work produced data that disproved the results of nearly all the existing stock spam research.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Grant Jordan: Mild-mannered electrical engineer by day, electronic safe-cracking tool designer by night. He's been known to spend his spare time reading spam, looking for obscure loopholes in sweepstakes rules, and pretending to be a professional photographer. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: