Pharmaceutical ‘phishing’

Adverts for medication to improve male sex drive are a staple of spam mailings. Like any other unsolicited messages, emails of this nature have evolved with time and today’s versions no longer merely contain promises of enahnced potency and a link to a site selling pills. In August and September we noted a series of mailings that used the names of well-known companies, that looked just like typical phishing messages. However, instead of a phishing site the links they contained led to an advert for “male medication”. 

All the messages in the mailings were made to look as though they had come from FedEx, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and other popular companies and services. One of those names was usually used in the ‘From’ field of the messages. The text body in the messages imitated official letters from the companies, including logos and signatures from ficticious employees. It was all meant to convince recipients that the emails were genuine. But an attentive user would easily notice from the sender’s address that it was anything but genuine, and was most probably generated automatically. There were several variants of message within a mass mailing.

The spammers used a number of pretexts to get users to click the links. For example, some emails imitated legitimate messages about undelivered emails, profile registration, deleting of unread emails, etc. The messages were intentionally very short, prompting the recipient to click the link in order to find out more information. But the link actually redirected to an advertising site for pharmaceutical spam.

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