LEET'11 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Large-scale exploits and emergent threats
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain
SP '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
No plan survives contact: experience with cybercrime measurement
CSET'11 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Cyber security experimentation and test
Show me the money: characterizing spam-advertised revenue
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
Measuring and analyzing search-redirection attacks in the illicit online prescription drug trade
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
An analysis of underground forums
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
PharmaLeaks: understanding the business of online pharmaceutical affiliate programs
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Pick your poison: pricing and inventories at unlicensed online pharmacies
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
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Large-scale abusive advertising is a profit-driven endeavor. Without consumers purchasing spam-advertised Viagra, search-advertised counterfeit software or malware-advertised fake anti-virus, these campaigns could not be economically justified. Thus, in addition to the numerous efforts focused on identifying and blocking individual abusive advertising mechanisms, a parallel research direction has emerged focused on undermining the associated means of monetization: payment networks. In this paper we explain the complex role of payment processing in monetizing the modern affiliate program ecosystem and characterize the dynamics of these banking relationships over two years within the counterfeit pharmaceutical and software sectors. By opportunistically combining our own active purchasing data with contemporary disruption efforts by brand-holders and payment card networks, we gather the first empirical dataset concerning this approach. We discuss how well such payment interventions work, how abusive merchants respond in kind and the role that the payments ecosystem is likely to play in the future.