Friday, November 28, 2008

Government to own majority of RBS / NatWest

Royal Bank of Scotland branch
The sale is part of the government's bail-out of the banking system

The government is to own 57.9% of Royal Bank of Scotland after shareholders bought only a tiny proportion of the new shares being offered by the bank.

The small take-up had been expected as the offer price of 65.5p was about 10p higher than the price at which the shares were trading.

The share issue by RBS, which owns NatWest, was part of the government's plan to recapitalise banks.

The government will pay about £15bn for the majority stake in the bank.

It will also buy £5bn of preference shares in the bank.

Existing shareholders agreed to buy almost 56 million shares, which represents just 0.24% of the new shares on offer, at a cost of £36.7m, making an immediate paper loss of £5.6m.

Strings attached

RBS shareholders voted to take the government money at a meeting last week.

There will be strings attached, with the bank losing freedom in areas such as executive pay and dividend policy.

RBS also had to agree to return to "normal" lending practices, and last week it announced that it would guarantee overdraft rates and contracts for its business customers for at least a year.

RBS is one of the many banks that has been hit by its exposure to debt based on US sub-prime loans.

It has also struggled with the collapse in inter-bank lending as the whole industry worried about which of their peers they could afford to lend to.

Critics say that RBS paid too much to buy ABN Amro last year. It led a consortium that paid 71bn euros ($91bn; £61bn) for the Dutch bank in October 2007.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Study shows how spammers cash in

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7719281.stm

Sale signs in shop window, PA
A tiny response means spammers still cash in (PA)

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.

The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year.

It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.

Slim pickings

The spam study was carried out in early 2008 by computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD).

For their month-long study the seven-strong team of computer scientists infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.

At its height Storm was believed to have more than one million machines under its control.

The team, led by Assistant Professor Stefan Savage from UCSD, took over a chunk of the Storm network to make it easier to run their study.

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

They created several so-called "proxy bots" that acted as conduits of information between the command and control system for Storm and the hijacked home PCs that actually send out junk mail.

The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them.

Fake pharmacy website, UCSD/UC Berkeley
The research team created a legitimate looking pharmacy site.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way Storm spreads using viruses and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.

The fake pharmacy site was made to resemble those run by Storm's real owners but always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The vast majority of these were for the fake pharmacy campaign.

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.

The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up to the full Storm network the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.

While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past.

They suggest that the tight costs might also open up new avenues of attack on spammers.

The researchers concluded: "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Kew's - 250th birthday next year.

I've spent many hours at Kew in the early 1980s.

Audio Slideshow: Kew's beautiful buildings

The world famous gardens at Kew in west London will celebrate their 250th birthday next year.

They began life in 1759, when Princess Augusta - the mother of King George III - started an amibitious nine acre garden around Kew Palace.

Today, covering 326 acres, the Royal Botanic Gardens are home to the world's largest living plant collection - with 30,000 species listed.

But the World Heritage Site is also home to more than 40 listed structures.