PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs

Damon McCoy, Andreas Pitsillidis, Grant Jordan, Nicholas Weaver, Christian Kreibich,
Brian Krebs, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Kirill Levchenko
Abstract- Online sales of the third-party servers and
unauthorized products drive a robust advertising sector
which involves phishing and email spam. Mainly,
everybody has met temptations for buying drugs from
an online Canadian drugstore. The aim of this research
is to evaluate and understand the commercial of
connected medicinal affiliate packages. In this research
paper, the author exploits a rare opportunity to
evaluate major three organizations for example Spam
IT, RX-promotion and the GlavMed pharmaceutical
affiliate programs. With the help of the ground truth
system, the author examined the key aspects of the
affiliate program and also provided an in-depth analysis
of the demand of these servers. Moreover, the author
included the viewpoints of other researchers in order to
recover excellence of the research and also described
the importance of independent third party developers in
order to demonstrate the overall business model of
affiliate programs.
Index Terms— unauthorized products, email spam,
pharmaceutical affiliate programs and so on.
INTRODUCTION
Advertising is an effective driver for underground
criminals where they can easily perform hacking
related activities. There are various kinds of activities
can be performed by the hackers for example spam,
unauthorized networks, social spam, search-engine
abuse and so on. The major focus of this research is
to examine the business of online pharmaceutical
affiliate and understand the impact of pharm leaks on
the personal information of consumers [1]. It is
observed that an emerging investigation has
developed and implemented in the last two years for
understating the business model of the affiliate
programs. Moreover, in this study, the authors
deliver a rare counter point and include various kinds
of serendipitous circumstances. By determining of
thousands of orders and comparing the revenue of
affiliate business the researchers are able to develop
comprehensive documentation on the major three
activities which involve customers, advertisers and
sponsors.
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
It is argued that abusive internet advertising is a kind
of process that has existed virtually in the businesses
and it uses internet connections for communicating
with the customers. In this generation there are major
two advertising channels are used for example rogue
advertisers and sponsored search that help criminals
for performing email spams and other hacking
processes. Because of the weight against these
campaigns several genuine consumers will engage
numerous advertisers and also produce problems for
the companies [2]. A recent report highlighted that
email spam is a very common security threat that
occurred due to the use of unwanted links and mails
transferred by the criminals. It is estimated that
around 80% of email spams and unwanted mails
shilled for medicine free drugs.
The structure and model or such activities has
modified effectively in the last few years and market
specialization has highly removed the self-governing
broth to nuts consumers who recently controlled the
entire sale procedure [3]. Amazon is an example that
uses the concept of affiliate programs and also
provides such kinds of services to their stakeholders
and consumers. However, it has been intensely
interlined within the subversive bionetwork. It is
argued that the affiliate type of commercial perfect
has major two key benefits for the advertiser, for
example, large mobility and increases the focus of the
companies [1].
Without requiring attending to problems for example
payment processing, consumer services, web site
development and many more, the consumers are a fee
to focus on the single task. In terms of a mobility
affiliate program is more effective that has the
potential to improve business opportunities and
allows the consumers to switch from one program to
another in very less time. It a specific affiliate
program shut down or does not work properly then
consumers can still monetize their investments by
adopting other sponsors. It is argued that there
advantages of such kinds of programs are more
effective for sponsoring affiliate programs and
consumers can invest their money by evaluating and
analyzing the business model of the affiliate. It is
observed that connected medicinal sales in one of the
PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of
Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs

effective and largest affiliate markets that supports
around 10 affiliate programs and thousands of
advertisers. In the recent study, the authors examined
that the combined turnover of business leads affiliate
programs effectively and more than 86,000 orders per
month obtained by the consumers.
In this research study, the authors identify the key
aspects of the affiliate program and evaluate the
business model of online pharmaceutical programs.
For a better understanding of the research questions,
the authors include major three programs in the study
such as SpamIt, RS-promotion and GlavMed. All
these companies are providing affiliate related
services to their consumers and many business
communities are using the concept of pharmaceutical
affiliate.
AUTHENTICITY AND ETHICS
In this section, the author evaluated and demonstrated
major two concerns linked with the business model
of affiliate which involves ethics and authenticity of
the servers. It is very effective for providing several
rough contexts which leads to the release of data sets
of the developed systems. From the previous
investigation, it has found that both GlavMed and
RX-promotion both are long operating
pharmaceutical programs that are mainly
implemented in Russia. Because of several key
factors and reasons enmity implemented between
owners in every program which increase various
kinds of security threats, for example, spam,
phishing, denial of services attacks and so on [4]. By
using channels and networks provided by the affiliate
companies the authors collected major three
transactional data sets that supported affiliate
programs in an appropriate manner. In order to
understand the key idea behind pharmaceutical
affiliate program, the authors suggested that the
readers can read pharma Wars provided by Brian
Krebs.
The researchers detected that the data sets are very
large and details that could be grossly fraudulent but
it argued that the overall costs of developing such
kinds of systems would be more effective. Moreover,
the transactional data and facts develop a more
complex system for which consumers require a
platform that can reduce complexity and provide in-
depth analysis of the research topic. Ethically, it is
very important for consumers to maintain their
collected data and information but hackers are more
effective that uses high level programing codes for
performing malicious related activities [5]. Therefore,
it is stated that criminals collect data of consumers
and organizations and break their privacy without
their permission which is ethically wrong. The
authors examined that the collected data is largely
available and the skills of its existence, its relation
with the GlavMed, and other affiliate companies can
enhance the rate of security threats. Moreover, some
of the over-arching contents have been publicly
documented and evaluated by consumers.
DERIVED DATA
With the help of “found data” the researchers also
describe numbers of issues and challenge that impact
on the developed business models. This section
evaluates the data sets and also describes how
consumers can derive the relationship between the
collected data and research concerns. It is argued that
the initial two collected statistics sets are
PostgresSQL of the working scheme for GlavMed
and SpamIt programs that involve data, schemes and
other key functions. Mainly the data base of
GlavMed was developed in year 2004v in which the
hackers developed and implements numbers of
snapping tools. For better understanding, the author’s
analyzed major five tables in their investigation
which includes shop sales, shop transactions, shop
consumers, shop affiliates and shop-affiliates income
data [4].
ANALYSIS
It is analyzed that both pharmacies and advertisers
are not able to generate their own capital because
they exploit latent consumer request for the services
by providing better offers which also drives the
ecosystem. Table 1 show that around 584,199 unique
consumers located their orders using GlavMed.
Moreover, minimum 535,365 consumers also placed
their orders through SpamIt. It is observed that RX-
Promotion is a small affiliate program which covers a
very shorter time in which around 59,769 distinct
customers paced their orders [2]. It is identified that
both affiliate companies are situated in Russia. Based
on consumer shipping information, the consumers
can determine the complete information including
GlavMed and SpamIt programs. The prevsious study
found that consumers from the U.S. around 75% of
orders were placed in last few years and there are few
other countries where the consumers placed their
orders through both affiliate programs such as
Canada, Australia, and populous countries in Western
Europe.