According to Pfizer and Microsoft, operators of such online stores employ a network of people for order-taking, distribution and mass spam mailings to drive traffic to the Web sites. Order-takers might be in one place, shippers in another. And the operators go to great lengths to disguise their identities.
Microsoft attorney Aaron Kornblum said the operator of one of the sites registered its Web address using the name of a legitimate consumer, whose identity had been stolen. The lawsuits do not identify the alleged operators by name and there was no way to reach them for comment.
While all this was going on, there was a sobering slew of new data, from International Business Machines Corp., about the sorry state of computer security.
How bad is it? Last year, according to IBM, which helps companies operate their electronic networks:
• The number of known computer viruses grew by 28,327, an increase of 25 percent from 2003. There are now 112,438 known viruses.
• Of more than 147 billion e-mails IBM scanned, 6.1 percent contained viruses.
• Phishing, in which online consumers are tricked into providing personal data to scam artists, rose by 5,000 percent over the previous year.
• Hackers introduced malicious code in picture formats in order to attack a number of different applications used to render images.
And if that's not enough, here's an IBM peek into the future: Viruses are now showing up in mobile and wireless devices, and might soon be found in embedded computer systems such as those in cars.
Like many technologists, Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy, worries that at some point, consumers could lose so much faith in the security of the Internet that they will turn away from it.
But it's too early to declare defeat, he said.
He and Kornblum noted, for example, that while spam continues to account for more than 70 percent of all Internet mail traffic, less of it is reaching consumers' mailboxes, thanks to improved filtering and other network security measures.
Businesses, consumers, and the makers of hardware and software all will play a role in stemming the tide of online malice, McIrvine said.
"The problem is, can they respond quickly enough?" he said.
