An organized crime group thought to include individuals responsible for the notorious Storm and Waledac worms generated more than $150 million promoting rogue online pharmacies via spam and hacking, according to data obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.
I recently returned from a trip to Russia, where I traveled in part to interview a few characters involved in running the world’s biggest illicit online pharmacies. I arrived just days after the real fireworks, when several truckloads of masked officers from Russian drug enforcement bureaus raided a party thrown exclusively for the top moneymakers of Rx-Promotion, a major e-pharmacy program co-owned by one of the men I went to meet.
The man arrested in Armenia last week for allegedly operating the massive “Bredolab” botnet — a network of some 30 million hacked Microsoft Windows PCs that were rented out to cyber crooks — appears to have generated much of his clientele as a key affiliate of Spamit.com, the global spamming operation whose members are blamed for sending a majority of the world’s pharmaceutical spam.
