Firstmed Blog

It emerged last week that Pfizer, the manufacturers of super drug Viagra have been sending vast quantities of spam email over the past six months. Pfizer is a pretty big drug manufacturer is it not? Then why have they been hawking Viagra and fake Rolex watches through their email network?

Well apparently they didn’t know about it.

At least 138 of Pfizer’s IP addresses were infected by Malware, which instructed them to send out spam on behalf a very ingenious hacker that had penetrated their systems. Aside from Viagra, the spam advertises penis-enlargement drugs, fake Rolexes and shares. According to botnet-tracking company Support Intelligence, those IP addresses have now been blacklisted by anti-spam companies. Support Intelligence has saved 600 sample spam emails over the past six months, and contacted Pfizer about the problem.

There have been implications in the press that Pfizer haven’t done anything about it because the spamming campaign is of benefit to them. I disagree. Spam is an annoyance. It takes longer and longer to sift through the stuff to see if there’s something trapped that shouldn’t be. Or, reviewing what’s in your inbox for something there that should have been trapped. Spam costs hundreds of pounds per year per employee in lost productivity and higher computing bills. While home computer users are at risk from emails that ask them to reveal their bank details, a practice known as phishing. Spam represents for most people, one of the principal instruments of dodgy business practices and of illegal communication in the modern age. Why would a large multi-national company want any association with it?