Study Links Storm Botnet's Growth To Illegal Drugs

talkinsecurity writes "Researchers at IronPort today published a study which claims to have found the 'smoking gun' that links the rapid growth of the Storm botnet to spammers that sell prescription drugs illegally over the Internet. The study shows that more than 80 percent of Storm-generated spam is advertising online pharmacy brands, and further investigation showed that spam templates, credit card processing, product fulfillment and customer support are all being provided by a 'Russian criminal organization' that operates in conjunction with Storm. This criminal organization recruits botnet spamming partners to advertise their illegal pharmacy Websites, which receive a 40 percent commission on sales orders. IronPort went as far as to do pharmacological testing on the products, and found that two-thirds of the drugs contained the wrong dosage of the active ingredient, and the rest were placebos."

Comments

Re:It's True

[TheGratefulNet]

what a horrible headline.

we have enough problems with people confusing hackers with crackers (etc); we have the ever-present 'war on drugs' (that will NEVER end; see the book '1984' and its view on why a continual war on 'something' is always good for the gov.).

but this is NOT about 'illegal drugs'; its about the LEGAL ones that do many of the same things the 'illegal ones' do but have congress supporting them. the problem is, the 'legal drugs' are outrageously priced (compared to the true selling price that the rest of the world tends to get) and so OF COURSE people on limited income (that's most of us, btw) can't afford the artificially high (heh) drug prices.

THAT is the problem to solve. make drugs affordable and there will be NO MORE 'online pharms'.

but why *solve* the root-cause problem? its not the american way anymore (sadly) ;(

at any rate, this is not about 'illegal drugs'. what they are selling may or may not be quality; but the compounds you are buying are NOT illegal!

for once, lets tie spam to the LEGAL otc drugs. tell it how it is - that by the large-scale addiction we create on so-called legal drugs, we have forced people to go around the very expensive system and find other ways to get their 'legal fix'.

you have to look at the magnitude of how evil the 2 sides are. arguably if the health care system was WORKING, we wouldn't have a market for 'affordable' prescription drugs.

fix the real problem and the ancillary one will fix itself.

Re:There will always be suckers

[jgarra23]

It's hard to imagine a legitimate scenario where someone would be forced to use spammers to provide their meds. As for the internet stock scams, or the Nigerian scam, only the greedy will apply.

All in all, I don't think you needed the disclaimer.


Normally I would agree with you :)

When I was in college I broke my wrist falling on some ice while doing laundry around 4am (long story, you know college...) anyway, i went to the hospital in all my dirty clothing & they refused to give me any pain medication for fear I was some hippie junkie (no kidding) just looking for a fix. Luckily my dad was head of ultrasound there & as soon as he showed up their attitude did a 180. I didn't even want the drugs, I'm allergic to opiates but the principle of the whole thing... The pain was pretty intense, who could I turn to for pain management when the hospital thought I was just some bum because I was in dirty clothes had I not had some "pull" there?

It was a pretty scary thought and still haunts me to this day.