Pharmaceutical scams and Phishing related attacks hit record levels

by Steve Ragan - Sep 29 2009, 16:46

According to a report from MarkMonitor, Phishing related attacks hit record highs in the second half of 2009, with more than 151,000 unique attacks. Related to the Phishing data, MarkMonitor also noted that pharmaceutical brandjacking has grown 67 percent since 2007, raking in an estimated $11 billion in sales in 2009.

“Scammers are opportunists, and by targeting the supply chain they’re positioning themselves to move the greatest amount of fake product they can,” said Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor. “This maximizes their return on the scam but it also poses a potential danger to peoples’ health and safety, not to mention brand reputation.”

Against the backdrop of the healthcare reform debate in the U.S., and the medical profession bracing itself for another wave in H1N1 virus cases this fall, consumers are turning to the Internet, visiting both legal and illicit online pharmacies. At the same time, offshore manufacturers are embracing B2B exchange sites to sell bulk quantities of branded prescription drugs, often of suspicious quality, the report notes.

As more people try to save money when purchasing drugs and more companies look to streamline operations, especially given the current state of the global economy, the cost savings and efficiencies of e-commerce become even more attractive, presenting a tempting opportunity for online fraud and brand abuse on both the supply and demand side of the equation.

In the latest Brandjacking Index report, MarkMonitor chose six well-known prescription drug brands and examined nearly 20,000 instances of Cybersquatting, where trademarks are abused within the domain name system. In addition, they discovered 3,000 online pharmacies and 652 B2B exchange listings for those brands during July 2009.

The Brandjacking Index also examined Phishing trends for Q2 2009. The trends revealed record levels of Phishing attacks and attacks per organization. While MarkMonitor’s numbers might look completely off center compared to other Phishing reports, MarkMonitor counted the number of unique URLs when crunching the data, taking in to account Fast Flux domains, where a single hostname is hosted on servers in different locations and changed periodically.

The report says that payment services continue to be a popular Phishing target, representing 49 percent of the total number of attacks in Q2 2009, up from 42 percent in Q1 2009. Social networks have also shown substantial increases in Phishing attacks, increasing 168 percent from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.

The average number of phishing attacks per organization also increased to record levels, with 351 attacks per organization on average in Q2 2009. When looking at the 151,000 Phishing attacks, the U.S. hosted the largest number of them. Fifty percent of the total recorded attacks in Q2 2009 came from the U.S., followed by Canada with 13 percent, with Germany, Russia, and Hungary rounding out the top five locations.

The entire report can be downloaded from http://markmonitor.com/

 

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