Hundreds Click On 'click Here To Get Infected' Ad

[Guest Reimar]

If you see an Ad like this one:

Drive-By Download

Is your PC virus-free?

Get it infected here!

drive-by-download.info

What do you do?

The following article shows how much people just clicking on it!

Read here:

Over the course of 6 months, 409 people clicked on an ad that offered infection for those with virus-free PCs. Didier Stevens, who ran the ad via Google Adwords, works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group. 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. "You can start with a couple of euros per month. And that gave me an idea: this can be used with malicious . It's a way to get a drive-by download site on the first page of a search."

Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a "Thank you for your visit" message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words "drive-by download" along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

Of the 409 people who clicked, 98% were running Windows machines, according to the user agent string, which is a text string that identifies a Web site visitor to a server. Users using different versions of IE, Safari, Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey all clicked the ad. 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. And, although a healthy amount of people clicked on it, he said there's "no way to know what motivated them to click on my ad. I did not submit them to an IQ-test." Stevens said he's sure he could get much more traffic if he invested more in his Google Adwords budget and came up with a better designed ad.

And than the question's came up for me: "How much Google take care for security?" and "Is there anything you can trust (by Google)?" and and and..........!

You can read the full article here and ask you own questions about Google!

[dave_boo]

If you see an Ad like this one:

Drive-By Download

Is your PC virus-free?

Get it infected here!

drive-by-download.info

What do you do?

The following article shows how much people just clicking on it!

Read here:

Over the course of 6 months, 409 people clicked on an ad that offered infection for those with virus-free PCs. Didier Stevens, who ran the ad via Google Adwords, works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group. 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. "You can start with a couple of euros per month. And that gave me an idea: this can be used with malicious . It's a way to get a drive-by download site on the first page of a search."

Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a "Thank you for your visit" message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words "drive-by download" along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

Of the 409 people who clicked, 98% were running Windows machines, according to the user agent string, which is a text string that identifies a Web site visitor to a server. Users using different versions of IE, Safari, Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey all clicked the ad. 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. And, although a healthy amount of people clicked on it, he said there's "no way to know what motivated them to click on my ad. I did not submit them to an IQ-test." Stevens said he's sure he could get much more traffic if he invested more in his Google Adwords budget and came up with a better designed ad.

And than the question's came up for me: "How much Google take care for security?" and "Is there anything you can trust (by Google)?" and and and..........!

You can read the full article here and ask you own questions about Google!

Statistically, 0.16% is within any margin of error. How many were misclicks? ETC?

The other way of thinking about it is that only 0.16% of internet users who managed to arrive at that page are idiots. Either way, I'm proud that it was so few.

[Guest Reimar]

Statistically, 0.16% is within any margin of error. How many were misclicks? ETC?

The other way of thinking about it is that only 0.16% of internet users who managed to arrive at that page are idiots. Either way, I'm proud that it was so few.

That's not the point. But it's anyway more than stupid from that people who clicked on the link!

No, what I think is that Google accept advertisments and link's like this! What is about that advertisment where you can't see where they connecting too? Or other link's?

I do believe that is a question of security and if a company like Google, one of the biggest of it's kind from this world, allow actions like this than you need to start about what's really happens in and with this company. There already a lot of complains about Security, data control and others against this company!

[waldwolf]

I'm surprised it took 6 months to get 409 hits.

Half those hits were probably "sniffers" from various anti-malware producers, with the other half from malware competitors or "want-to-be's".

waldwolf

[cdnvic]

I've seen legitimate ads with much worse click through rates.

I wonder how much of it is just people reading it wrong and thinking its an antispyware or AV advert.