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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) by Tork on Tuesday June 17 2014, @03:27AM

    by Tork (3914) on Tuesday June 17 2014, @03:27AM (#56214)
    I wonder how many just assume that because money has changed hands there's a way to track them down if the software did any damage to their machines. Honestly I'd probably fall for that too, albeit on a disposable machine.
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