If you are wondering why the influx of malware never seems to cease, here's another explaination: According to a report by security vendor Sophos, Russian cyber gangs are employing sophisticated affiliate networks to proliferate their rogue software applications, as well as to peddle pharmaceuticals and counterfeit brand-name goods.  

I wrote about rogue software a while ago, which typically consists of fake antivirus applications designed to extort money from unwitting users and acts as malware.

So what are affiliate schemes? Well, they are a marketing scheme that has proven to be especially effective and popular with online marketers. Referral sites are identified either by cookies or using information embedded via URLs. Depending on the actual affiliate scheme signed up for, referral sites are rewarded with a cash commission that is pegged to the number of unique users who either visit, download a trial, or make a purchase.

In fact, many big name vendors have such schemes; they range from well-known online retailers such as Amazon to service providers like SugarSync. When done properly, affiliate schemes can be extremely lucrative. I recall how eBay in its earlier days ran an aggressive affiliate program in which new sign-ups generated a referral fee to the tune of (about) $6 per person. As you can imagine, this can add up to a very respectable sum for someone who is able to bring in say, a hundred sign-ups a day. 

In effect, the Russian cyber gangs have created a distribution scheme to reward referrals to their drive-by malware sites, or when a user installs one of their malware clients. And unlike legitimate affiliate schemes, they don't care how this was achieved. As such, it is not hard to imagine that even with a lower pay-out, the dollars can pour in pretty quickly considering that the typical botnets these days consists of tens of thousands of commandeered workstations. 

If anything, this revelation proves that the problem is deeply rooted and harder to wipe out than previously imagined. Already, I get over a hundred spam emails that are sieved out by my anti-spam filters every day. With the potential financial rewards so high, I doubt the spam will be going away anytime soon. - Paul Mah