'One of the first things I got was a huge amount of internal emails from ChronoPay. And then ChronoPay got hacked, either by an insider or outsider - most likely an insider just got bribed into giving up the information.' And the other character, Pavel Vrublevsky, someone I went to see in Moscow, was still running ChronoPay, and he was also working with a friend of his in a fifty-fifty partnership to run a competing pharmacy spam affiliate program that also had many of the same spammers and virus writers working for him. And that quickly became the most popular pharmacy spam program on the internet, and employed the best virus writers and spammers. 'One of the guys, Igor Gusev, went off and started a pharmacy spam program. The two founders of ChronoPay figure prominently in his blog, Krebs on Security, and his book, Spam Nation.

So they started ChronoPay and worked together for a couple of years, and then had a falling out.' They both ran affiliate programs that catered to Russian adult webmasters, and they were looking for a better way for those webmasters to get paid. 'I then learned that ChronoPay was actually a company that was formed in 2003 by two Russian guys who got their start in the extreme pornography space. When the researchers tracked who processed those payments, it was almost always ChronoPay.' Every time I worked with researchers who are tracking how people were paying to get their computers back after they were hijacked, they were paying with credit cards. At the time the biggest problem that most computer users were dealing with was rogue antispyware, or rogue antivirus stuff. 'And ChronoPay showed up on my radar soon after I started that project.

Where are the places, if they went away, a whole lot of this bad stuff would go away?' 'In 2008 I started to do a lot of reporting for The Washington Post that was focused on some of the centers of badness on the internet.

Spam Nation by Brian Krebs