Here’s a little scenario for you: Say you were performing a search on Google and stumbled into an advertisement that said the following:

Drive-By Download Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!

Would you click it? Also, knowing that the website has a .info extension (which is popular among malware distributors) and the idea that malware-infected websites are on the rise in popularity, would you click on it then? Some people may think this is a ridiculous question, but a security expert posted this exact ad up to see how many hits he could get. He surprisingly got more than he was expecting.

A spoof ad campaign offering surfers the chance to infect their PCs with malware has drawn plenty of interest.

In an experiment, a security researcher bought a Google ad campaign to promote a site ostensibly offering to infest visitors’ Windows PCs with computer viruses. The “click here to be infected” campaign was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, at a click-through rate of 0.16 per cent or around one in 500. The cost of the six-month campaign was $23, or around 5c per chance to infect a PC.[more]

Tags: Malware