Canadian Pharmacy Spam Re-emerges

Security researchers at McAfee have detected a new spam campaign associated with the old Canadian Pharmacy theme. Meirgen Krehs, Researcher at McAfee Avert Labs, states that some time has passed since anything has been spotted referencing the Canadian Pharmacy. Yet, according to him, a huge number of URLs related to spam has been discovered that all associate with a few widely documented malicious Internet Protocol ranges, as reported by SCMagazine on July 1, 2010.

The expert stated that one of the IP ranges alone was capable of giving a list of nearly 200 similar URLs having terms like drugs, pill, pharm, med, or erect. He noted that although the IP ranges had the spam term 'Canadian Pharmacy,' the most visited domains under those ranges were from Ukraine and Russia.

McAfee disclosed that the initial web-pages of all the URLs had the much known format of the Canadian Pharmacy Group, though showing separate smiling individuals in the current instance. According to the security researchers, despite the websites acquiring a fresh design, they had the typical scam goals and patterns of pharmaceutical spam.

Hence, McAfee's experts suggest that there were around a few hundreds of fresh URLs appearing every day. Users landing on any of these websites must deal with it very carefully.

Apart from this, they should be vigilant if these websites have any clue suggesting Canadian Pharmacy Group jointly with an offshore country TLD. In case, one is found, site visitors should close the page quickly. Moreover, they shouldn't become lured or trapped into any offer these sites may make.

Meanwhile, the pharmacy-related e-mail junk has increased lately. Symantec, in its MessageLabs Intelligence Report (June 2010), disclosed that there had been an identification of pharma-themed spam that utilized an attachment with disguised JavaScript.

Moreover, other study papers from security researchers at MX Logic and McAfee indicated that pharma spam accounted for 90% of the total junk e-mail. This form of spam dominated with respect to content, while the Canadian Pharmacy in particular remained the single biggest pharma spam.

Related article: Canadian Retailer Faces Security Breach of Customer Credit Numbers

» SPAMfighter News - 7/13/2010