TY - CONF
T1 - PharmaLeaks
T2 - 21st USENIX Security Symposium
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Pitsillidis, Andreas
AU - Jordan, Grant
AU - Weaver, Nicholas
AU - Kreibich, Christian
AU - Krebs, Brian
AU - Voelker, Geoffrey M.
AU - Savage, Stefan
AU - Levchenko, Kirill
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants NSF-0433668, NSF-0433702, NSF-0831138 and CNS-0905631, by the Office of Naval Research MURI grant N000140911081, and by generous research, operational and/or in-kind support from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, HP and the UCSD Center for Networked Systems (CNS).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 21st USENIX Security Symposium. All rights reserved.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Online sales of counterfeit or unauthorized products drive a robust underground advertising industry that includes email spam, “black hat” search engine optimization, forum abuse and so on. Virtually everyone has encountered enticements to purchase drugs, prescription-free, from an online “Canadian Pharmacy.” However, even though such sites are clearly economically motivated, the shape of the underlying business enterprise is not well understood precisely because it is “underground.” In this paper we exploit a rare opportunity to view three such organizations—the GlavMed, SpamIt and RX-Promotion pharmaceutical affiliate programs—from the inside. Using “ground truth” data sets including four years of raw transaction logs covering over $185 million in sales, we provide an in-depth empirical analysis of worldwide consumer demand, the key role of independent third-party advertisers, and a detailed cost accounting of the overall business model.
AB - Online sales of counterfeit or unauthorized products drive a robust underground advertising industry that includes email spam, “black hat” search engine optimization, forum abuse and so on. Virtually everyone has encountered enticements to purchase drugs, prescription-free, from an online “Canadian Pharmacy.” However, even though such sites are clearly economically motivated, the shape of the underlying business enterprise is not well understood precisely because it is “underground.” In this paper we exploit a rare opportunity to view three such organizations—the GlavMed, SpamIt and RX-Promotion pharmaceutical affiliate programs—from the inside. Using “ground truth” data sets including four years of raw transaction logs covering over $185 million in sales, we provide an in-depth empirical analysis of worldwide consumer demand, the key role of independent third-party advertisers, and a detailed cost accounting of the overall business model.
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M3 - Paper
AN - SCOPUS:84900789776
SP - 1
EP - 16
Y2 - 8 August 2012 through 10 August 2012
ER -