Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval
Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval
RxNorm: Prescription for Electronic Drug Information Exchange
IT Professional
Tor: the second-generation onion router
SSYM'04 Proceedings of the 13th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 13
An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of internet miscreants
Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Spamalytics: an empirical analysis of spam marketing conversion
Proceedings of the 15th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain
SP '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Measuring and analyzing search-redirection attacks in the illicit online prescription drug trade
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
BitShred: feature hashing malware for scalable triage and semantic analysis
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Fashion crimes: trending-term exploitation on the web
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
SURF: detecting and measuring search poisoning
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
PharmaLeaks: understanding the business of online pharmaceutical affiliate programs
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
Priceless: the role of payments in abuse-advertised goods
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Traveling the silk road: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
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Electronic commerce has transformed how goods are supplied to consumers, but has also exposed weaknesses in supply regulations of certain goods, such as alcohol, weapons or prescription drugs. While licensed pharmacies have tread carefully with online sales, many enterprising operators have been selling pharmaceuticals without a license for years. Despite facing considerable adversity, unlicensed online pharmacies have managed not only to survive, but even to generate considerable revenue. In this paper, we attempt 1) to understand the economic reasons for their success, while facing stiff competition from both legal and illegal alternatives, and 2) to identify characteristics of their supply chains that could be used to disrupt illicit sales. We collected six months' worth of inventory and pricing data from 265 online pharmacies that advertise through search- engine poisoning. We compare this to data from Silk Road, an anonymous online marketplace, and from familymeds.com, a licensed online pharmacy. We discover that instead of directly competing with licensed pharmacies, unlicensed pharmacies often sell drugs that licensed pharmacies do not or cannot sell. Furthermore, unlicensed pharmacies are not only cheaper overall, but they also offer volume discounts. Clustering analysis of inventories reveals that only a few suppliers appear to cater for most unlicensed pharmacies, which suggests that cutting them off could disrupt unlicensed sales. Cross-validating our data with inventories from a random sample of 265 different pharmacies deemed ``not recommended'' by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy shows that our results are consistent across different types of questionable vendors.