As Samosseiko notes in his paper "The affiliate marketing models work well for products with large profit margins. Generic drugs produced without a licence, pornography, pirated software, casinos, dating sites… the list goes on. These are the topics we commonly see in email and web spam, but not everyone knows that each theme is backed by numerous affiliate organizations with thousands of advertisers. Another fact, known to security industry researchers, is that the majority of the most powerful and controversial affiliate networks are based in Russia."

This is all about affiliate marketing.  The bad guys build the nasty stuff - be it bogus anti-virus, bogus products, whatever.  The affiliates market it.  They will use any methods at their disposal, based primarily on search engine optimisation and using automatically generated content.  According to Samosseiko "The authors claim that even humans have difficulty recognizing that the content was generated automatically and that it's impossible for a search engine to tell the difference."

Figures as high as $US1,600 per day are earned from these ventures.

Sophos Australia's Paul Ducklin attended the presentation and noted that "Finishing optimistically, Dmitry encouraged fellow security researchers to work ever more closely with law enforcement and ISPs to orchestrate rogue network takedowns, and to keep up the abuse reports to billing and hosting companies."

There is considerable depth to the presentation; beyond what could be covered in this short announcement.  I recommend you read it in depth.

However, in short don't believe the spam, not that you have in the past, of course!

PS - one small aside.  During research for this article, I asked Google to search for "Partnerka." According to my Trend Micro security software, more than one seemingly innocuous site attempted to add my PC to a bot-net.  I suggest you don't try the same searches - these guys are nasty!