14 DAY TRIAL // According to a report from Trend Micro, junk emails with a medical theme were the most common type of spam observed this year, even though they didn't always lead to rogue pharmacy websites.
Medicine has always been among the top categories of spam, but even more so this year as malware distributors and phishers also adopted the theme.
"Pharmaceutical and other health-related spam remained the most notorious type throughout the year," the Trend Micro researchers write.
"This spam type was not limited to selling pharmaceutical products online, the spammers also used these messages to disguise their phishing and malware attacks," they add.
In addition, there were a lot of other cases where spam emails did not have a medical theme by themselves, however the links they contained led users to rogue pharmacy websites.
Sometimes these rogue emails were part of combined attacks, where users were directed to both pharma sites and drive-by download pages.
Back in September we reported about a wave of fake Facebook emails, which allegedly notified users of unread messages, but all of the links led to online pharmacies.
Fortunately, things calmed down for a bit at the beginning of October when Spamit, the largest rogue online pharmacy affiliate program, closed down because of pressure from authorities.
Spamit worked with the gangs controlling some of the world's biggest spam botnets and was primarily responsible for the notorious Canadian Pharmacy operation.
The same month Russian authorities launched a criminal investigation into the activities of Igor A. Gustev, the person believed to be responsible for Spamit.
The problem of fake pharmacies is so bad that even Google stepped up its fight against them. The search giant announced taking multiple advertisers to court for deliberately violating its policies and pushing pharma spam onto its ad network.
Unfortunately, the decrease of medical spam resulting from the Spamit closure did not last too long. The empty space left by the Canadian Pharmacy was filled in rather quickly by other affiliate programs.