Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
It's Easy to Infect People With Malware If You Pay Them a Few Cents | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 28 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Hartree on Monday June 16 2014, @11:07PM

    by Hartree (195) on Monday June 16 2014, @11:07PM (#56140)

    I wonder if anyone downloaded it onto a sandboxed system on an isolated network just to analyze it?

    "Unknown? Hah! I bet I can figure out what this sucker is doing!"

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Interesting=4, Total=4
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   5  

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Monday June 16 2014, @11:40PM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday June 16 2014, @11:40PM (#56150) Journal

    For 10 bucks an hour, I'd gen up a throw-away Virtual machine and run their little malware for them, I'd even give it a slooooooow internet connection with egress filtering.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:11AM

      by Marand (1081) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:11AM (#56158) Journal

      That was my first thought, too. "Ten bucks an hour? Sure! Just let me set up a throw-away VM with nothing useful on it real quick..."

      Second thought was idle curiosity about if the mystery-binary would run in wine or not. You can tell if wine's doing well by how well it can run mystery malware.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:01AM (#56155)

    Ironically about 20 minutes ago someone called me with a Nigerian accent. I asked him if he's Nigerian and if he speaks Igbo and he said he wants someone that speaks English. I told him I speak English (among other languages) and it's my native language. He said he is calling me to tell me about my windows computer. I told him I know everything about computers including how to fix them and write software. He said thank you and have a nice day. He was clearly trying to scam me by putting malware on my computer as I have received these types of phone calls in the past.