Click Here To Get Infected With A Virus!
from the and-people-click dept
Remember back in the early days of internet banner advertising, when the "rules" were that you had to include the phrase "click here!" somewhere in your banner ad to let clueless surfers know that they could actually click on the ad and dig deeper into your advertising goodness? Apparently, that old "click here" trick still works -- even when the ad is promising to infect your computer with a virus. A security researcher put up a Google text ad reading: "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" Apparently, that was enough to convince 409 people to click on the ad over the course of about 6 months. As the Wired blog post notes, it's quite likely that some of those people figured it was a joke and were curious and another group probably only skimmed it quickly and naturally assumed it was for an anti-virus product. Still, it's an interesting bit of data -- made even more interesting by the guy saying that no one ever complained about the ad and Google never noticed it.
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by RandomThoughts on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:12am
Maybe people wanted to check their virus protection programs.
I once watched a guy push on the barrel of a .45 with the palm of his hand and then pulling the trigger to see if the safety feature would actually prevent it firing.
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Re: by Az on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:18am
you need to change the crowd you hang out with....
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And another group... by Andrew on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:20am
And another group of people were Linux users who wanted to laugh as the virus did nothing
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Re: And another group... by nice on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:26am
how sweet it is
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aww man! by chris on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:47am
why the hell didn't I get a virus?
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Re: And another group... by Steven on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:51am
That's what I was thinking. I'd grab it just to look at it, feeling pretty certain it couldn't do anything to my Kubuntu box. :)
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Re: And another group... by Not Linux Users on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:57am
98% of the machines ran Windows
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i am a recent convert to Kubuntu by glitch on May 15th, 2007 @ 11:16am
and i never, ever want to be classified a typical linux user
i find Linux users everybit as distastefule as Microsoft shills
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Just like... by Mr. Magoo on May 15th, 2007 @ 11:20am
Paris Hilton found the same thing out long ago. "Touch here and get a virus!"
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CLICK HERE! by RSSONEPR on May 15th, 2007 @ 11:23am
Funny enough, we all clicked to read the posting.
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by Anonymous Coward on May 15th, 2007 @ 1:08pm
You're all talking rubbish. It's impossible to get infected by any virus on a windows computer.
Windows firewall is simply too advanced. Viruses bounce off it like peas off a tank.
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Darn.... by Grandfather Time on May 15th, 2007 @ 1:23pm
I was hoping to get my free virus....
I wanted to name him slappy......
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giggity giggity goo by Jay on May 15th, 2007 @ 1:59pm
and then the Linux users went to do an upgrade and had to rebuild their computer again...so the Linux user bought an Apple cuz that was much easier for the Linux user to use...
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virus... by Kevin on May 15th, 2007 @ 2:02pm
Hey I know lets all put on penguin tshirts and then you can come over to my house to play dungeons and dragons...
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Re: by right... on May 15th, 2007 @ 2:11pm
Like depleted uranium peas going .99c off a cardboard tank.
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#1 by Former gunshop manager on May 15th, 2007 @ 3:33pm
Had a clerk shoot himself through his hand the way described in comment #1 above. Could not believe it. Lucky for him he was playing with his .25 auto. Unlucky for me the bullet still had enough energy to put a hole in the front display window!
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by Darryl on May 15th, 2007 @ 5:21pm
"my ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times"
This is really newsworthy? With the percentage if the internet population tht are complete imbeciles, I'm simply surprised that the figure is so low.
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Limits to everything but stupidity..... by TechNoFear on May 15th, 2007 @ 9:19pm
I worked creating on-line share trading software for a while.
We had a 'white label' product and resold it to different brokers, including two major banks.
The online account creation form had been used for over a year without issue (or much change).
For some reason 10% of the new bank's customers 'ticked' every box on the form, even the mutually exclusive choices.
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Yep, I fell for it. by IronChef on May 15th, 2007 @ 10:55pm
I like admitting mistakes. But understand that the most influential person I've ever met in my professional life had this to say about mistakes "Only when sleeping do you make no mistakes. Mistakes are the privilege of the active person, who can start over and put things right."
I remember seeing this ad and clicked on it thinking it was a link to a dry-humor joke site. I figured that Google had some quality control mechanism-- possibly limit credit cards for ads to business credit cards.
When I clicked on it, it scared me because all it did was close my browser window. Spent a whole day virus-scanning, SpyBotting, and optimizing registry settings.
In the end I'm happy that I did because my computer runs quite a bit faster now, but that certainly doesn't excuse Google's lax QC standards...
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Re: Yep, I fell for it. by Brutus Beefcake on May 16th, 2007 @ 11:17am
"When I clicked on it, it scared me because all it did was close my browser window. Spent a whole day virus-scanning, SpyBotting, and optimizing registry settings."
You need a better OS.
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by Ron Larson on May 16th, 2007 @ 11:03pm
In high school I worked weekends at an equipment rental yard. One morning this guy rented a sand blaster. So I hooked it up to his hitch and then fired it up to demonstrate how to use it.
He grabbed the hose from me and tells me he already know how to use it. He turns it on the air pressure, then the sand valve, but nothing comes out.
Then to my shock he decides to check the sandblaster by pointing the nozzle at his hand to feel for air coming out. I was shocked! I grabbed the hose from him and yelled at him for being such an idiot. "What if some sand decided to come out just then?", I screamed at him. "You would have lost your hand!"
The guy just looked at me stupidly. I showed him how to test for air pressure by sprinkling some loose grains of sand on the ground and pointing the nozzle at them.
I just remember looking at this idiot wondering how on earth he had managed to live to the age he did and still have his limbs intact.
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by asp on Jun 1st, 2007 @ 12:54am
Бараны
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gentlebob@hotmail.com by MOO on Aug 5th, 2008 @ 2:03pm
gentlebob@hotmail.com
I got a virus
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