It is much easier to infect people with malware if you pay them a couple of cents.

Original author: Pranav Dixit
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Would you have installed malware yourself if someone paid you for it?

A team of 4 researchers found that from 22% to 43% of the subjects are ready to download and run an unknown executable file, if they pay in the range from 1 cent to 10 dollars.



The researchers used the service Mechanical Turk (from the translator - a service designed to perform cheap routine work by performers from third world countries, for example, manual recognition of captcha). Participants were asked to install a program for themselves and run it to work for an hour. At the same time, the subjects did not know what she was actually doing. Within 5 weeks, the amount of remuneration increased from 1 cent to 10 dollars, respectively, the percentage of users who started the program grew until it reached a maximum value of 43%.

The paper concludes that “users are generally not disturbed when launching programs of unknown origin, provided their incentives outweigh their inconvenience.” This means that instead of paying for expensive botnets, hackers could simply pay a few cents to their victims in order to gain access to their systems.

From the translator: this is how the business plan is seen: we take the cryptocurrency miner, call it “a distributed computing program for some medical purposes,” and say that the user will drop 1-2 cents for every 24 hours of his system (the sum remuneration is determined based on the capacity of the system). Make a threshold of withdrawal of money dollars at $ 50, in time to remove the cream, and all ... God, how easy it is to buy us ...

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