By Darren Pauli, 18 Jun 2014
Security white hats, despair: users will run dodgy executables if they are paid as little as one cent.
Even more would allow their computers to become infected by botnet software nasties if the price was increased to five or 10 cents. Offer a whole dollar and you'll secure a herd of willing internet slaves.
The demoralising findings come from a study lead by Nicolas Christin, research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab which baited users with a benign Windows executable sold to users under the guise of contributing to a (fictitious) study.
The Register/ full read here/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/18/everyone_go_home_people_accept_one_cent_to_run_trojan/
Userlevel 7
Really? It's amazing. I don't know anyone who would run malware happily for mere cents. I have seen few people run malware but in a safe closed environment for testing purposes and for free.
Userlevel 7
+56
It's pretty amazing what people will do for small amounts of money. There's lots of interesting game theory stuff out there. Speaking of CMU, there was an awesome professor when I went there, who talked about experiments he did in game theory with real money: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Dawes
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