Comments on: Taking human stupidity to new extremes: Click here to infect your PC

By: Don

Don — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:27:45 +0000

As an expert in paid search ads, I can tell you these numbers don’t mean a whole lot. It’s a click-through rate of only 0.15%, which would be considered by most as a failed ad. Also, chances are that most of these impressions didn’t come from people search on security terms, and were probably shown on Google’s network of sites that agree to show ads for a cut of the money.
Now if this was done on a more targeted level, we could probably get some more intriguing details.

By: Angelina

Angelina — Mon, 21 May 2007 14:57:20 +0000

That sounds funny

By: Rob dunn

Rob dunn — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:06:54 +0000

Remember though, Windows caters to the lowest common denominator much more than Apple or Linux does. Not to say all Windows users are part of this “low-denominator” category, but it is more than likely that most low-denominator users are Windows users. Also, Linux/Mac has that “but its different” stigma that many people don’t like to grapple with.

Most folks who use computers at their jobs use Windows, so they will naturally purchase a PC with Windows on it at home. Every single company I’ve ever worked at has used Windows as their desktop OS…and this includes working in the Public sector.

People who use Macs & Linux at work are probably more than likely system admins/tech-heads or graphics artists (again, a generalization), all of whom are a bit more savvy when it comes to what/what not to click on when on the Internet.

So I think the only real data this survey gave us was that the people who clicked on that link weren’t thinking, clicked accidentally, were security professionals (as stated above) or were just ignorant…I suspect it is a combination of all these - too bad there wasn’t a poll at the website asking the people these questions!

By: links for 2007-05-18 | Mansoor Nathani's Blog

links for 2007-05-18 | Mansoor Nathani's Blog — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:40:16 +0000

[...] Taking human stupidity to new extremes: Click here to infect your PC [...]

By: Kiltak

Kiltak — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:42:46 +0000

Did you know that there are ways to unformat a formated drive? Back then, there was a DOS utility named unformat.

By: Cannonball

Cannonball — Thu, 17 May 2007 10:46:28 +0000

It is a fantastic article.
Still I can’t forget the day, sooo many years ago, I was formatting a floppy on the work notebook of a friend, and after digiting:
c:> format c:
when the system asked if I really was sure, I told myself “funny, i’m never asked this question when I am formatting a floppy”, and I answered yes…
geez, then I understood the sentence “I’ve never seen a mistake I could never do” by Johann W. Goethe!

By: sixties

sixties — Thu, 17 May 2007 09:31:46 +0000

Yes I agree… it doen’t mean anything.

People are curious to know what hides behind this strange link.

I agree that a lot of people aren’t critical when they surf the web but this is not a common case.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Thu, 17 May 2007 09:15:39 +0000

I’d click it just to see what it is since I’m using Linux and 99% sure it won’t be aimed at my OS.

“Push the big red ‘do not press’ button” syndrome is often part of the hacker personality. “But I wanna see what happens!!!” “Oh, what’s this do?” “How’s that work?” *press* “oh neat! I wanna do it again and figure out how it works!” *press* then they go off and reverse engineer the thing

By: Tish

Tish — Thu, 17 May 2007 07:03:59 +0000

Kiltak, you’ve been tagged.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 17 May 2007 05:20:01 +0000

I love your article!

By: Paul Warren

Paul Warren — Thu, 17 May 2007 02:02:11 +0000

No I’m sure more of them were complete idiots. My mom clicked “add and remove programs” and removed a bunch of stuff not knowing what she was doing. Then wondered why the Mine Sweeper link would open a dos box…

She’s learned from that since then but it does prove the “do not push” on the big red button syndrome actually exists in some people to choose to push it anyway.

By: Kiltak

Kiltak — Wed, 16 May 2007 20:15:47 +0000

I’m pretty sure that in the 400 people or so that clicked on the ad, some of them must have been security professionals that were curious about what the ad would lead to

That’s probably where the 2% of the remaining OSs came from..