The fact that 409 people clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs proves that people will click on just about anything.

409 people clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:

Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info

In a posting about the drive-by download campaign, Stevens says that he got the idea after picking up a small book on Google Adwords at the library and finding out how easy and cheap it is to set up an ad. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. The site is benign and has never hosted malware or other scripts or code. He started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words “drive-by download” along with the ad, which links to the drive-by-download.info site. Next, he sat and waited … for six months. Over that period, his ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about .16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine. Stevens says that he designed his ad to make it look fishy, but he had no problem getting Google to accept it and has had no complaints to date.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Technology, That's Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.