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It's Easy to Infect People With Malware If You Pay Them a Few Cents

posted by n1 on Monday June 16 2014, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-do-anything-for-cash dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Gizmodo reports:

A team of four researchers found [PDF] that 22 to 43 percent of their test subjects would download and run an unknown executable file for payments ranging from as low as $0.01 to $1.

The researchers used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to conduct the experiment. Participants were asked to download a program onto their systems and run it for an hour. They did not know what the program actually did. As the amount offered to run the program was increased from $0.01 to $10 over five weeks, the percentage of users who ran the program grew steadily and topped out at 43 percent.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Popeidol on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:19AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:19AM (#59304) Journal

    You're posting on articles about how you shouldn't download unknown software, and saying it can be fixed by downloading an unknown piece of software.

    Do you see how that might not be the best technique? Accompanying it with text that reads half way between spam and the guy from Timecube [timecube.com] doesn't help the situation.

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