Fascinating writeup

But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.

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