Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door

by Brian Krebs

spam is the primary vehicle for most cybercrime.

It’s worth noting that the Target breach began with a spam email sent to a heating and air conditioning (HVAC) vendor that worked with Target and had remote access to portions of Target’s network.

It’s become clear (to me, at least) that the entire credit card system in the United States is currently set up so that any one party to a transaction can reliably transfer the blame for an incident, dispute, or fraud to another party.

there are currently more than thirty million misconfigured or seriously outdated systems on the Internet—mostly old DSL routers being used by people like you and me (and even provided to us by our cable and Internet providers)—that can be remotely and trivially abused to launch these crippling attacks.

Antivirus companies now report that they are struggling to classify and combat an average of 82,000 new malicious software variants attacking computers every day, and a large percentage of these strains are designed to turn infected

The databases offered an unvarnished look at the hidden but burgeoning demand for cheap prescription drugs, a demand that appears driven in large part by Americans seeking more affordable and discreetly available medications.

We assume that if we don’t open the emails or don’t purchase anything from them, we aren’t affected.

Rubatsky’s network of child porn sites attracted more than 100,000 visitors per day and generated revenues of nearly $5 million per month. But before long Alfa-Pay found itself at odds once again with Petrovsky’s BillCards payment-processing business.

partner-turned-nemesis—Igor Gusev—was behind this ruse, but for the moment I didn’t want to do anything to deter my sources from sharing

But contrary to popular belief, most of the people buying from spam aren’t idiots or crazy. The majority appear to be technologically unsophisticated people making rational (if potentially risky) choices based on one or a combination of several primary motivations:

Those who bought drugs other than male enhancement pills almost universally said they responded to prescription drug spam either because they had no health insurance, or because the same drugs available under their health plans cost two to five times as much as the drugs offered via these legitimate-looking Canadian pharmacy sites.

The researchers discovered that U.S. customers selected non-lifestyle items 33 percent of the time. In contrast, Canadian and Western European customers almost always bought drugs in the lifestyle category—only 8 percent of the items placed in their shopping carts were non-lifestyle items. In other words, many more Americans were turning to these spam pharmacies for prescription drugs to treat critical medical

The GAO found that roughly 80 percent of the raw ingredients that go into all pharmaceuticals—including those peddled by rogue online pharmacies, approved online pharmacies, and even Main Street vendors like CVS and Walgreens—come from chemical factories based in India and China.

According to LegitScript, there are more than 35,610 active Internet pharmacies, yet only 212 are approved and legitimate web pill shops. In other words, if you order from one, you have more than a 99 percent chance of using an illegitimate, unapproved website.

Though few knew about it at the time, one of the firms invited—Google—was already under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for actively courting fake Canadian pharmacies—including many rogue Internet pharmacies created by SpamIt and Rx-Promotion—to advertise drugs for distribution in the United States.

In their “PharmaLeaks” paper, the UCSD researchers discovered that just 10 percent of the highest-earning affiliates accounted for 75 to 90 percent of total program revenue across all three affiliate programs.

According to Knowledge@Wharton, a publication from the Wharton business school, a staggering 70,000 Russian companies each year become targets of raider attacks.