Category Archives: Pharma Wars

Russian e-Payment Giant ChronoPay Hacked

December 29, 2010

Criminals this week hijacked ChronoPay.com, the domain name for Russia’s largest online payment processor, redirecting hundreds of unsuspecting visitors to a fake ChronoPay page that stole customer financial data.

ChronoPay chief executive Pavel Vrublevsky said the bogus payment page was up for several hours on Christmas day, during which time the attackers collected roughly 800 credit card numbers from customers visiting the site to make payments for various services that rely on ChronoPay for processing.

Bredolab Mastermind Was Key Spamit.com Affiliate

October 30, 2010

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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.

Spam Volumes Dip After Spamit.com Closure

October 4, 2010

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Spam trackers are seeing a fairly dramatic drop in junk e-mail sent over the past few days, specifically spam relayed by the one of the world’s largest spam botnets – although security experts disagree on exactly which botnet may be throttling back or experiencing problems.

Spam Affiliate Program Spamit.com to Close

September 27, 2010

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Spamit, a closely guarded affiliate program that for years has paid some of the world’s top spammers to promote counterfeit pharmacy Web sites, now says that it will close up shop at the end of September.