Fergie's Tech Blog

Experts Link Flood of 'Canadian Pharmacy' Spam to Russian Botnet Criminals

Ellen Messmer writes on NetworkWorld:

The world's currently most voluminous spam generator, “Canadian Pharmacy,” is clogging networks with come-ons for male-enhancement drugs and painkillers -- and there’s growing belief it has a link to Russian cybercrime groups selling counterfeit medicines.

In this case, "Canadian Pharmacy," hyping itself as “the #1 Internet Online Drugstore,” is neither Canadian nor a pharmacy. In fact, "Canadian Pharmacy" doesn’t appear to exist as an established Web site but only a shifting hyperlink in a spam message generated by about eight crime botnets.

Spam volumes as a whole skyrocketed 60% between January and June to 150 billion messages a day, according to a report released this week by Marshal8e6, a vendor of Web and anti-spam security products, which says so-called “pharmaceutical spam,” or “pharma spam” for short, constitutes 75% of that.

posted by Fergie @ 7/16/2009 04:48:00 PM