Researchers run porn sites for "research"

CYBERSPACE—In what is being called the first analysis of its kind, five security researchers from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and UC Santa Barbara operated their own adult website in order to understand firsthand how the adult online economy works, according to an article on MIT’s Technology Review website. A paper on their findings will be presented June 7 at the Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard University.

The bad news, wrote Christopher Mims, is that the researchers concluded the industry is “exposing everyone who consumes its wares to previously unsuspected levels of malware.” Data culled from their own sites shows that “43 percent of the clicks that arrived at their own adult website belonged to users whose browsers were vulnerable to a known exploit in either Adobe Flash or handling of the Microsoft Office or Adobe PDF document types.”

The group purchased traffic from brokers in the course of their research, reportedly spending $160 to acquire 47,000 clicks, of which 20,000 could have been exploited to build a botnet, according to the article. What the researchers discovered is that “they easily could have leveraged their investment for a hefty profit by serving as the vector for a Pay-Per Install affiliate program, which in one instance offered $130 per 1,000 installs to drop malicious code (malware, adware etc.) onto exploited machines.”

Curious to assess how much of the potentially vulnerable sites were actually being exploited, the team, led by Glibert Wondracek, built an automated web-crawler that downloaded “the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23 percent of those pages ‘were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads,’ five times the prevalence of malware discovered by previous research on the subject,” wrote Mims.

Read the entire story here: avn.com