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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, Funny) by e_armadillo on Monday June 16 2014, @11:22PM

    by e_armadillo (3695) on Monday June 16 2014, @11:22PM (#56144)

    From the title I hoped the people were infected.

    --
    "How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Funny=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by BsAtHome on Monday June 16 2014, @11:43PM

    by BsAtHome (889) on Monday June 16 2014, @11:43PM (#56152)

    Well, many of them are carrying the "I'm too stupid" virus and some of them are in the infectious state.