Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Mischief for Lazy Bastards

In an attempt to quantify just how easy it is to infect someone's computer with a virus, a guy paid Google adwords to run the following:

Is your PC virus free? Get it infected here!

He ran the ad for six months and 409 people clicked on it.

Personally, I'm a Mac guy and I take it for granted that no one writes viruses for me (there ain't no future in that) so I probably would have clicked on it just to see what happens. But according to Didier Stevens, 98% of the respondents were Windows users. Disappointingly there was no virus; perhaps he'll be getting angry mail about that in the future.

What I take away from this story, by the way, is that it's really cheap to buy some space on Google Adwords. I need to push the podcast that way.

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