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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: 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.