Is Your PC Virus Free?

Filed in archive News on May 22, 2007

It was a successful experiment or an utter failure of judgment, depending on which side of the equation you were on. Didier Stevens, a security professional with what appears to be a wicked sense of humor, set up a link which proved his point that people will click on nearly anything. The link read like so:

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

That his ad was viewed 259,723 times isn't surprising - Stevens listed it on Google Adwords, which appears on numerous websites. What was surprising is that even with the ad wording promising an infection, 409 people still clicked on it. Mind you, that's 409 people in six months, but it proves his point that some people are just curious enough to go where they shouldn't. Stevens says that had he invested more time and money (less than a few euros each month), his click-through results may have, sadly, gone higher. What's worse - what could have been a true virus could by now have spread throughout a data center to other data centers and across the Internet, depending on the level of infection.

It's safe to click here and view Didier Stevens' weblog. It's also safe to head over to eWeek and read an article about Stevens' experiment.