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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: 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.

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  • (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.