"No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. The site is benign and has never hosted malware or other scripts or code.
Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words 'drive-by download' along with the ad, which links to the drive-by-download.info site.
Next, he sat and waited ... for six months.
Over that period, his ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about .16 percent.
The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.
Of the 409 people who clicked, 98 percent were running Windows machines, according to the user agent string, which is a text string that identifies a Web site visitor to a server."
While .16% does not seem like a large number, if done in large enough quantities, it can be a huge number. What is scary here is that people knew what they were clicking on before they clicked it.
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