Posts Tagged: Rx-Promotion

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars — 10 Comments
3
Apr 12

Gateline.net Was Key Rogue Pharma Processor

It was mid November 2011. I was shivering on the upper deck of an aging cruise ship docked at the harbor in downtown Rotterdam. Inside, a big-band was jamming at a reception for attendees of the GovCert cybersecurity conference, where I had delivered a presentation earlier that day on a long-running turf war between two of the largest sponsors of spam.

Promenade of SS Rotterdam. Copyright: Peter Jaspers

The evening was bracingly frigid and blustery, and I was waiting there to be introduced to investigators from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Several FSB agents who attended the conference told our Dutch hosts that they wanted to meet me, but in a private setting. Stepping out the night air, a woman from the conference approached, formally presented the three men behind her, and then hurried back inside to the warmth of the reception.

A middle-aged stocky fellow introduced as the senior FSB officer spoke in Russian, while a younger gentleman translated into English. They asked did I know anything about a company in Moscow called “Onelia“? I said no, asked them to spell it for me, and inquired as to why they were interested in this firm. The top FSB official said they believed the company was heavily involved in processing payments for a variety of organized cyber criminal enterprises.

Later that evening, back at my hotel room, I searched online for details about the company, but came up dry. I considered asking some of my best sources in Russia what they knew about Onelia. But a voice inside my head warned that the FSB agents may have been hoping I’d do just that, and that they would then be able to divine who my sources were when those individuals began making inquiries about a mysterious (and probably fictitious) firm called Onelia.

My paranoia got the best of me, and I shelved the information. That is, until just the other day, when I discovered that Onelia (turns out it is more commonly spelled Oneliya) was the name of the limited liability company behind Gateline.net, the credit card processor that processed tens of thousands of customer transactions for SpamIt and Rx-Promotion. These two programs, the subject of my Pharma Wars series, paid millions of dollars to the most notorious spammers on the planet, hiring them to blast junk email advertising thousands of rogue Internet pharmacies over a four-year period.

WHO IS ‘SHAMAN’?

Gateline.net states that the company’s services are used by firms across a variety of industries, including those in tourism, airline tickets, mobile phones, and virtual currencies. But according to payment and affiliate records leaked from both SpamIt and Rx-Promotion, Gateline also was used to process a majority of the rogue pharmacy site purchases that were promoted by spammers working for the two programs. Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars — 14 Comments
1
Feb 12

Who’s Behind the World’s Largest Spam Botnet?

A Wikileaks-style war of attrition between two competing rogue Internet pharmacy gangs has exposed some of the biggest spammers on the planet. The latest casualties? Several individuals likely responsible for running Grum, currently the world’s most active spam botnet.

Grum is the top spam botnet, according to M86Security

In the summer of 2010, hackers stole and leaked the database for SpamIt and Glavmed, sister programs that paid people to promote fly-by-night online pharmacies. According to that data, the second-most successful affiliate in SpamIt was a member nicknamed “GeRa.” Over a 3-year period, GeRa’s advertisements and those of his referrals resulted in at least 80,000 sales of knockoff pharmaceuticals, brought SpamIt revenues of in excess of $6 million, and earned him and his pals more than $2.7 million.

A variety of data indicate that GeRa is the lead hacker behind Grum, a spam botnet that can send more than 18 billion emails a day and is the primary vehicle for more than a third of all junk email.

Hackers bent on undermining SpamIt leaked thousands of chats between SpamIt members and Dmitry Stupin, the co-administrator of the program. The chats show daily communication between GeRa and Stupin; the conversations were usually about setting up new spamming operations or fixing problems with existing infrastructure. In fact, Stupin would remark that GeRa was by far the most bothersome of all the program’s top spammers, telling a fellow SpamIt administrator that, “Neither Docent [Mega-D botmaster] nor Cosma [Rustock botmaster] can compare with him in terms of trouble with hosting providers.”

Several of those chats show GeRa pointing out issues with specific Internet addresses that would later be flagged as control servers for the Grum botnet. For example, in a chat with Stupin on June 11, 2008, GeRa posts a link to the address 206.51.234.136. Then after checking the server, he proceeds to tell Stupin how many infected PCs were phoning home to that address at the time. That same server has long been identified as a Grum controller.

By this time, Grum had grown to such an established threat that it was named in the Top Spam Botnets Exposed paper released by Dell SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart. On  April 13, 2008 – just five days after Stewart’s analysis was released -  GeRa would post a link to it into a chat with Stupin, saying “Haha, I am also on the list!” Continue reading →

Pharma Wars — 21 Comments
17
Nov 11

Pharma Wars: The Price of (in)Justice

I spoke this week at Govcert 2011, a security conference in Rotterdam.  The talk drew heavily on material from my Pharma Wars series, about the alleged proprietors of two competing rogue Internet pharmacies who sought to destroy the others’ reputation and business and ended up succeeding on both counts. Here is the latest installment.

For those who haven’t been following along, I’ve put together a cheat sheet on the main players, the back story and the conflict. Click here to skip this section.

Actors

Pavel Vrublevsky: Co-founder and Former chief executive officer of ChronoPay, until recently a major processor of electronic payments in Russia. Vrublevsky has been accused of running an illegal business, a rogue Internet pharmacy affiliate program called Rx-Promotion, and is currently in prison awaiting trial on unrelated cybercrime charges. Known to business partners as “Red” or “RedEye.”

Igor Gusev: Co-founded ChronoPay with Vrublevsky in 2003. Had a falling out with Vrublevsky in 2005, left ChronoPay and started the Internet pharmacy affiliate programs GlavMed and SpamIt. The latter was closed in Sept. 2010, and Gusev has been charged with running an illegal business. He is still at large.

Dmitry Stupin: Gusev’s right-hand man. Helped to build SpamIt and GlavMed. The logs below are from a set of logs leaked to several download sites that contain thousands of conversations between Stupin and Gusev. The logs were obtained shortly after the police detained Stupin as part of the criminal investigation into Gusev.

Conflict: Two former business partners-turned-competitors try to sabotage each others’ business and to get the other arrested.

The Conversation

The conversation below takes place between Feb. 21 and 23, 2010, and is a chat log between Gusev and Stupin. Gusev already knows there are plans to file criminal charges against him, which indeed come just seven months after this conversation was recorded. The two are discussing plans to pay more than $1.5 million to politicians and law enforcement to obtain a criminal prosecution of Vrublevsky.

Several attendees at Govcert 2011 asked about the likelihood of Vrublevsky serving time, if convicted. This chat may provide a clue. In the middle of the following conversation, Gusev says he has secured promises that if arrested, Vrublevsky “would remain in prison and would not be able to pay his way out,” Gusev wrote. “He is going to lose a large portion of his business and will be left with no money to fight the war.”

Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars — 13 Comments
1
Nov 11

Jailed ChronoPay Co-Founder Denied Bail

A Moscow court on Monday denied bail for Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who was charged earlier this year with hiring hackers to launch costly online attacks against his rivals. The denial came even after Vrublevsky apparently admitted his role in the attacks, according to Russian news outlets.

Vrublevsky in 2004

Vrublevsky, 32, is probably best known as the co-founder of ChronoPay, a large online payment processor in Russia. He was arrested in June after Russian investigators secured the confession of a man who said he was hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor. The former ChronoPay executive reportedly wanted to sideline rival payment processing firms who were competing for a lucrative contract to process payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. Aeroflot’s processing systems faltered for several days in the face of the attack, an outage that Aeroflot says cost the company about a million dollars a day.

Vrublevsky’s lawyers asked the court to release him pending a trial in December — offering to pay 30 million rubles (~ USD $1 million) — but the court denied the request.

Vrublevsky co-founded ChronoPay in 2003 along with Igor Gusev, another Russian businessman who is facing criminal charges in Russia stemming from his alleged leadership role at GlavMed and SpamIt, sister programs that until recently were the world’s largest rogue online pharmacy affiliate networks. Huge volumes of internal documents leaked from ChronoPay last year indicate Vrublevsky co-ran a competing rogue Internet pharmacy — Rx-Promotion — although Vrublevsky publicly denies this.

Vrublevsky and Gusev have been locked in an increasingly heated and public battle to ruin the others’ business, a saga that I have chronicled in an ongoing series: Pharma Wars.

Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars — 23 Comments
12
Sep 11

Pharma Wars: Paying for Prosecution

In June 2011, Russian authorities arrested Pavel Vrublevsky, co-founder of ChronoPay, Russia’s largest processor of online payments, for allegedly hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals. New evidence suggests that Vrublevsky’s arrest was the product of a bribe paid by Igor Gusev, the other co-founder of ChronoPay and a man wanted by Russian police as a spam kingpin.

Igor Gusev, in an undated photo taken at a family birthday celebration.

Two years after forming ChronoPay in 2003, Gusev and Vrublevsky parted ways. Not long after that breakup, Gusev would launch Glavmed and its sister program SpamIt, affiliate operations that paid the world’s most notorious spammers millions of dollars to promote rogue Internet pharmacies. Not to be outdone, Vrublevsky started his own rogue pharmacy program, Rx-Promotion, in 2007, contracting with some of the same spammers who were working at Gusev’s businesses.

By 2009, the former partners were actively trying to scuttle each others’ businesses. Vrublevsky allegedly paid hackers to break into and leak the contact and earnings data from GlavMed/SpamIt. He also reportedly paid a man named Igor “Engel” Artimovich to launch a volley of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SpamIt.

Gusev told me he long suspected Artimovich was involved in the attacks, and that he had information that Vrublevsky hired Artimovich to attack ChronoPay’s rivals while they were locked in a competition for a lucrative contract to process online payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s biggest airline.

Last month, hundreds of chat conversations apparently between Gusev and his right-hand man, Dmitry Stupin, were leaked online. They indicate that Gusev may have caused Vrublevsky’s arrest by paying Russian law enforcement investigators to go after Artimovich.

Over the past year, Gusev has insisted in numerous phone interviews that the increasingly public conflict between him and Vrublevsky was not a “war,” but more of a personal spat. But if the chat below is accurate, Gusev most certainly viewed the conflict as a war all along.

The following is from a leaked chat, allegedly between Gusev and Stupin, dated Sept. 26, 2010. The two men had already decided to close SpamIt, and were considering whether to do the same with GlavMed. “Red,” mentioned twice in the discussion below, is a reference to Vrublevsky, also known as “RedEye.”

Gusev: $2k from HzMedia to China – it’s mine. We also need to send additional money for salaries plus double bonus to Misha (Michael). I have already paid $50k for Engel’s case (20к – forensics, $30к – to speed up the starting of the criminal case)

Stupin: Why have you paid for Engel’s case ? I was even against paying for the Red’s case. Why pay for Engel’s?  What is the point?

Gusev: To my mind, you do not fully understand what’s been going on for the last year. Paul has a plan to either throw me into jail or end me. His intentions are totally clear. There are only two choices: 1 – do nothing, and pay nothing to nobody, and at the end either go to jail or keep hiding until all the resources are exhausted; 2 – do the same thing, as he is doing, with the same goal.

Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / Web Fraud 2.0 — 25 Comments
19
Aug 11

Pharma Wars, Part II

Earlier this year, Russian police arrested Dmitry Stupin, a man known in hacker circles as “SaintD.” Stupin was long rumored to be the right-hand man of Igor Gusev, the alleged proprietor of GlavMed and SpamIt, two shadowy sister organizations that until this time last year were the largest sources of spam touting rogue Internet pharmacies.

According to several sources who are familiar with the matter, Russian police pulled Stupin off of a plane before it left Moscow. The police also reportedly took Stupin’s MacBook and copied its contents. The police detained Stupin as part of an investigation into Gusev launched nearly a year ago. Gusev fled his native Moscow last year and has not returned.

Sometime in the past few days, more than four years’ worth of chat conversations — apparently between Stupin, Gusev and dozens of other GlavMed employees — were leaked. Those conversations offer a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day operations one of the world’s largest cyber criminal organizations.

The chat logs also catalog the long-running turf battle between Gusev and his former business partner, Pavel Vrublevsky. The two men were co-founders of ChronoPay, one of Russia’s largest online payments processor. Vrublevsky is now in jail awaiting trial on charges of hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals. He also has been identified as a co-owner of a competing rogue pharmacy program, the now-defunct Rx-Promotion.

I have had numerous interviews with both Gusev and Vrublevsky, both of whom accuse one another of bribing Russian law enforcement officials and politicians to initiate criminal proceedings against each other.

While there is no direct evidence Vrublevsky paid for a prosecution of Gusev, documents stolen from ChronoPay last year by hackers indicate that the company arranged to pay the salaries of several people on the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC). Those same documents show that Vrublevsky and RAEC members were closely involved in the investigation into Gusev the months and weeks leading up to the official charges against him.

The chat records between Stupin and Gusev, a tiny sliver of which is translated here from Russian into English, suggest that the two men paid authorities for protection. Contacted via email, Gusev declined to say whether the chats logs were legitimate or comment further, explaining that he was still reviewing the documents.

“If at least some of these logs are legit, then it means that I was telling the truth about paid criminal case against me initiated by Pavel and his constant connection with investigators,” Gusev said. “I know for sure that Pavel had access to evidences which were gathered by the investigators while he shouldn’t have such access. Before I just didn’t have any proof for this. Now I have.”

The latest leaked archive contains more than 166 megabytes of chat logs, allegedly between Stupin, Gusev and others. The following chat log is dated Aug. 28, 2010, just days after Vrublevsky leaked the SpamIt and GlavMed affiliate and customer data to U.S. law enforcement agencies. In this conversation, Stupin and Gusev allegedly discuss whether to close SpamIt (SpamIt would be closed a month later). “Red” in the first sentence is a reference to Vrublevsky, well known to use the hacker alias “RedEye.”

Gusev: It looks like I am in deep shit.  Red gave our database to Americans.

Dmitriy Stupin

Stupin: To which Americans?

Gusev: I can’t tell exactly, yet. Probably to FBI or Secret Service. Have you read on Krebs’ blog about meeting at White House regarding illegal pharmacy problems on the Internet?

Stupin: No.

Gusev: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/08/white-house-calls-meeting-on-rogue-online-pharmacies

Stupin: Maybe you return back to Russia?

Gusev: I am planning to do that. I am really worried now :(

Stupin: What about Red? For that money. May be let’s close down everything?

Gusev: In any case, he will be squished to the end. Everything is done pretty properly. Chronology: – He got thrown out from major banks (Masterbank, Bank Standard and almost from UCS. Too many clients left him. Investigations have been made on data regarding processing. Major issue now – close down the channel via Azerbaijan  (the only place where he can do his own processing and processing for his clients). We need him have an acute issue with money, otherwise he is going to slow down the investigation as much as he can.

Gusev: Do you think “closing down” will help? Just realize: they have our ENTIRE database… there are 900,000 records. What are we going to do with those? For conviction and 5-year jail time it is only necessary to prove 1 transaction! What is the worst? They combine the sentences and it is possible to get 5 life sentences.

Stupin: I think yes, we will receive lower priority.

Gusev: And who is considered a high priority? I am trying to figure out how he gave us up, and do the same for him. There will be 2 cases instead of one.

Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / Web Fraud 2.0 — 22 Comments
23
Jun 11

Financial Mogul Linked to DDoS Attacks

Pavel Vrublevsky, the embattled co-founder of ChronoPay — Russia’s largest online payments processor — has reportedly fled the country after the arrest of a suspect who confessed that he was hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against a top ChronoPay competitor.

KrebsOnSecurity has featured many stories on Vrublevsky’s role as co-founder of the infamous rogue online pharmacy Rx-Promotion, and on his efforts to situate ChronoPay as a major processor for purveyors of “scareware,” software that uses misleading computer virus infection alerts to frighten users into paying for worthless security software.  But these activities have largely gone overlooked by Russian law enforcement officials, possibly because the consequences have not impacted Russian citizens.

In the summer of 2010, rumors began flying in the Russian blogosphere that Vrublevsky had hired a hacker to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Assist, the company that was processing payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. Aeroflot had opened its contract for processing payments to competitive bidding, and ChronoPay was competing against Assist and several other processors. The attack on Assist occurred just weeks before Aeroflot was to decide which company would win the contract; it so greatly affected Assist’s operations that the company was unable to process payments for extended periods of time. Citing the downtime in processing as a factor in its decision, Aeroflot ultimately awarded the contract to neither ChronoPay nor Assist, but instead to Alfa-Bank, the largest private bank in Russia.

According to documents leaked to several Russian security blogs, investigators with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) this month arrested a St. Petersburg man named Igor Artimovich in connection with the attacks. The documents indicate that Artimovich — known in hacker circles by the handle “Engel” — confessed to having used his botnet to attack Assist after receiving instructions and payment from Vrublevsky. The same blogs say Vrublevsky has fled the country. Sources close to the investigation say he is currently in the Maldives. Vrublevsky did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"Topol Mailer" botnet interface allegedly used by Artimovich.

The allegations against Artimovich and Vrublevsky were supported by evidence collected by Russian computer forensics firm Group-IB, which said it assisted the FSB with the investigation. Group-IB presented detailed information on the malware and control servers used to control more than 10,000 infected PCs, and shared with investigators screen shots of the botnet control panel (pictured at left) allegedly used to coordinate the DDoS attack against Assist. Group-IB said Artimovich’s botnet also was used to attack several rogue pharmacy programs that were competing with Rx-Promotion, including Glavmed and Spamit (these attacks also were observed by security firm SecureWorks in February).

This DDoS saga is the latest chapter in a fascinating drama playing out between the two largest rogue Internet pharmacies: Vrublevsky’s Rx-Promotion and Glavmed (a.k.a. “Spamit”), a huge pharma affiliate program run by Igor Gusev, the man who co-founded ChronoPay with Vrublevsky in 2003. Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / Web Fraud 2.0 — 22 Comments
28
Mar 11

Microsoft Hunting Rustock Controllers

Who controlled the Rustock botnet? The question remains unanswered: Microsoft’s recent takedown of the world’s largest spam engine offered tantalizing new clues to the identity and earnings of the Rustock botmasters. The data shows that Rustock’s curators made millions by pimping rogue Internet pharmacies, but also highlights the challenges that investigators still face in tracking down those responsible for building and profiting from this complex crime machine.

Earlier this month, Microsoft crippled Rustock by convincing a court to let it seize dozens of Rustock control servers that were scattered among several U.S.-based hosting providers. Shortly after that takedown, I began following the money trail to learn who ultimately paid the botnet controllers’ hosts for their services.

According to interviews with investigators involved in the Rustock takedown, approximately one-third of the control servers were rented from U.S. hosting providers by one entity: A small business in Eastern Europe that specializes in reselling hosting services to shadowy individuals who frequent underground hacker forums.

KrebsOnSecurity.com spoke to that reseller. In exchange for the agreement that I not name his operation or his location, he provided payment information about the customer who purchased dozens of servers that were used to manipulate the day-to-day operations of the massive botnet.

The reseller was willing to share information about his client because the customer turned out to be a deadbeat: The customer walked out on two months worth of rent, an outstanding debt of $1,600. The reseller also seemed willing to talk to me because I might be able bend the ear of Spamhaus.org, the anti-spam group that urged ISPs worldwide to block his Internet addresses (several thousand dollars worth of rented servers) shortly after Microsoft announced the Rustock takedown.

I found the reseller advertising his services on a Russian-language forum that caters exclusively to spammers, where he describes the hardware, software and connection speed capabilities of the very servers that he would later rent out to the Rustock botmaster. That solicitation, which was posted on a major spammer forum in January 2010, offered prospective clients flexible terms without setting too many boundaries on what they could do with the servers. A translated version of part of his message:

“I am repeating again that the servers are legitimate, funded by us and belong to our company. To the datacenters, we are responsible to ensure that you are our client, and that you will not break the terms of use. Also, to you we are responsible to make sure that the servers are not going to be closed down because of credit card chargebacks, as it happens with servers funded with stolen credit cards. In conclusion, they do not have an abuse report center, they are suitable for legitimate projects, VPNs and everything else that does not lead to problems and complaints to the data center from active Internet users. Please, take it in consideration, so that nobody is pissed off and there is no bad impression from our partnership.”

The reseller said he had no idea that his customer was using the servers to control the Rustock botnet, but he hastened to add that this particular client didn’t attract too much attention to himself. According to the reseller, the servers he resold to the Rustock botmaster generated just two abuse complaints from the Internet service providers (ISPs) that hosted those servers. Experts say this makes sense because botnet control servers typically generate few abuse complaints, because they are almost never used for the sort of activity that usually prompts abuse reports, such as sending spam or attacking others online. Instead, the servers only were used to coordinate the activities of hundreds of thousands of PCs infected with Rustock, periodically sending them program updates and new spamming instructions.

The reseller was paid for the servers from an account at WebMoney, a virtual currency similar to PayPal but more popular among Russian and Eastern European consumers. The reseller shared the unique numeric ID attached to that WebMoney account — WebMoney purse “Z166284889296.” That purse belonged to an “attested” WebMoney account, meaning that the account holder at some point had to verify his identity by presenting an official Russian passport at a WebMoney office. A former law enforcement officer involved in the Rustock investigation said the name attached to that attested account was “Vladimir Shergin.” According to the reseller, the client stated in an online chat that he was from Saint Petersburg, Russia.

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A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 34 Comments
25
Feb 11

Pharma Wars

How do you chronicle the struggle for control of an underground empire when neither combatant wants to admit that he is fighting or even that that a war is underway? That’s the nature of a business-feud turned turf-war that is playing out right now between the bosses of two of the Internet’s largest illicit pharmacy operations.

On Thursday, I wrote about an anonymous source using the pseudonym “Despduck” who shared a copy of the back-end database for Glavmed, a.k.a. “SpamIt”, until recently the biggest black market distributor of generic pharmaceuticals on the Internet. The database indicates that Glavmed processed in excess of 1.5 million orders from more than 800,000 consumers who purchased knockoff prescription drugs between May 2007 and June 2010.

Despduck first proffered the Glavmed data through a mutual source in the anti-spam community, and claimed that the alleged owner of the pharmacy program, a Russian businessman named Igor Gusev, would soon be charged with illegal business activities. Sure enough, near the end of September 2010, Russian officials announced a criminal investigation into Gusev and his businesses. Shortly after those charges were brought, SpamIt.com was closed down. Consequently, the volume of spam flowing into inboxes around the world fell precipitously, likely because SpamIt.com affiliates fell into a period of transitioning to other pharmacy networks.

Gusev is now in exile from Russia; he blames his current predicament– and the leak of the Glavmed data — on his former business partner, fellow Muscovite Pavel Vrublevsky. The latter is a founder of Russian e-payment giant ChronoPay, a company Gusev also helped to co-found almost eight years ago (according to incorporation documents I obtained from the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce — where ChronoPay was established — for a time Gusev and Vrublevsky were 50/50 partners in ChronoPay).

As reported in my story earlier this week, tens of thousands of internal documents and emails stolen from ChronoPay and leaked to key individuals suggest that Vrublevsky is managing a competing online pharmacy network called Rx-Promotion. It turns out that the Glavmed database was stolen at about the same time as ChronoPay’s breach.

Vrublevsky denies being the source of the purloined Glavmed/SpamIt database, but the bounty of leaked ChronoPay documents suggests otherwise. Included in the email records are messages sent to and from an inbox that used the display name “Kill Glavmed.” What was the email address tied to that name? “Despduck@gmail.com,” the very same address used to communicate with my anti-spam source.

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A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 35 Comments
24
Feb 11

SpamIt, Glavmed Pharmacy Networks Exposed

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.

In June 2010, an anonymous source using the assumed name “Despduck” began an e-mail correspondence with a key anti-spam source of mine, claiming he had access to the back-end database for Glavmed, a.k.a. “SpamIt”, until recently the biggest black market distributor of generic pharmaceuticals on the Internet.

Source: M86 Security Labs

If you received an unsolicited email in the past few years pimping male enhancement or erectile dysfunction pills, chances are extremely good that it was sent compliments of a Glavmed/Spamit contractor or “affiliate.” According to M86 Security Labs, the sites advertised in those Glavmed/Spamit emails — best known by their “Canadian Pharmacy” brand name — were by far the most prevalent affiliate brands promoted by spam as of June 2010.

Despduck said he could deliver data on hundreds of thousands of consumers who purchased pills through Glavmed’s sizable stable of online pharma shops, as well as detailed financial records of Glavmed/SpamIt affiliates who earned thousands of dollars of month promoting pharmacy sites using spam and hacked Web sites.

After many months of promising the information, Despduck finally came through with a 9-gigabyte database file that contained three years worth of financial books for the massive illicit pharmacy network. My source shared the data with several U.S. law enforcement agencies, and ultimately agreed to share it with me.

The database reads like a veritable rogues gallery of the Underweb; In it are the nicknames, ICQ numbers, email addresses and bank account information on some of the Internet’s most notorious hackers and spammers. This huge cache of information shows that over the course of three years, more than 2,500 “affiliates” earned hefty commissions promoting Glavmed’s pharmacy sites.

In total, these promoters would help Glavmed process in excess of 1.5 million orders from more than 800,000 consumers who purchased knockoff prescription drugs between May 2007 and June 2010. All told, Glavmed generated revenues of at least $150 million.

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