Dr Gianluca Stringhini presented a paper at the 2014 ACM Symposium Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) on the relations between the different actors in the spam landscape.
The paper aimed to shed some light on the relations between harvesters, botmasters, and spammers. By disseminating email addresses on the Internet, fingerprinting the botnets that contact these addresses and looking at the content of these emails, the relations between the actors involved in the spam ecosystem can be inferred.
The observations can be used by researchers to develop more effective anti-spam systems.