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The dark prescription: inside the infrastructure of illegal online pharmacies
Presented at the VB2025 conference in Berlin, 24 - 26 September 2025.
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✪ PRESENTED BY ✪
• Lubos Bever (Gen Digital)
• Jan Rubín (Gen Digital)
✪ ABSTRACT ✪
The internet is flooded with fake pharmacies – over 95% of them operate illegally, selling everything from counterfeit medications to unapproved or prescription drugs. These operations don't just steal money or data – they put lives at risk. And behind the scenes, a sophisticated cybercriminal infrastructure is fuelling it all.
In this talk, we expose the hidden architecture that enables these global operations. By analysing network setups, payment gateways, code reuse, and advertising tactics, we connected thousands of fraudulent pharmacy sites to a single, well-organized cybercrime group. This actor exploits Google indexing, hijacks legitimate medical sites, and leverages public hosting to appear trustworthy – all while funnelling users through spam, adult content platforms, and even AI chatbot prompts.
The most aggressively pushed products? Drugs that people are desperate to get: erectile dysfunction medications, powerful antibiotics, and – increasingly – expensive and trendy weight loss treatments. The real cost? Compromised data, empty bank accounts, and in the worst cases, dangerous health consequences.
We'll walk through how this ecosystem works, how it hides in plain sight, and what the cybersecurity community can do to better detect and disrupt these digital drug lords – before more lives are put at risk.