XXX Profits

By setting up their own adult websites, researchers who presented their paper at The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard University, discovered that 43% of the clicks at their site came from users whose browsers were vulnerable to a known exploit.

Researchers spent only $160 to acquire 47,000 clicks from adult traffic traffic brokers, of which 20,000 could have been exploited to build a botnet. The team found that they could have profited by serving a Pay-Per Install affiliate program, which offered $130 per 1,000 installs to drop malicious code onto exploited machines.

To assess how much malicious code is being injected into users' browsers by adult websites, researchers custom-built an automated web crawler to download the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23% of those pages were found to trigger malicious behavior.

By quick calculation, multiplying 3.23% by the percentage of internet users who view porn (42.7%) by the frequency with which porn is accessed, suggested that internet porn is a major vector for infection of vulnerable machines.