SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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This discussion has been archived.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
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Good day for a change of scene. Repaper the bedroom wall.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Monday June 16 2014, @11:22PM
Considering people using the Mechanical Turk are used to doing just about anything for a few cents, this experiment is not generalisable to the wider Internet. The is an implicit trust relationship of users of that service which is quite different than offering a few cents by email from an unknown source.
(Score: 1) by broken on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:17AM
Excellent point. This is one of the biggest problems when studying behavior: how to get a representative sample of the population you desire to study. Unfortunately, most studies need participants to cooperate in some way, and that significantly skews the sample population. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to estimate how much the average person would need to be paid to run an unknown program is so wrong that I can't imagine why anyone would waste their time trying it out, let alone actually following through and paying people to do it.
Now if they just wanted to find out how easy it is to use the Mechanical Turk to get people to run programs for future reference, then this makes perfect sense. Just don't try to generalize it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday June 17 2014, @01:58AM
Conversely, about 20 years ago there was a casual study done at LAX by one of the local TV news stations: Coins of various denominations were scattered fairly obviously around the passenger terminal, then watched to see how long it took them to be picked up.
What they found is that most people can't be arsed to pick up anything smaller than a quarter.
Not me... I'da scoured up every coin in sight. Money is money, and my time is worth very little. At the time it was pointed out that Bill Gates' time was so valuable, that stopping to pick up a quarter would cost him a thousand bucks.
But I still wouldn't run unknown software from Mechanical Turk (or anywhere else), at least not on my main machine. I do like someone's idea of running it on a junk box or VM for as many hours as they'd pay me for. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @12:54AM
Is it really all that different from trusting websites that you read to not deliver you any malware? It isn't measured in pennies but otherwise it seems like basically the same thing to me.
(Score: 1) by jelizondo on Tuesday June 17 2014, @03:05AM
Ahh! To be young and candid!
The percentage of people who would run an unknown application is probably higher in the wild; just tell them they need "abc" program to see the latest video from the Kardashians (or however it is spelt.)
Now, get off my lawn!