Professors Research Economics of Porn, Become Heroes of Academia

If you really want to get to the bottom of a particular subculture, you've really got to immerse yourself in it. With this in mind, then, a group of five security "researchers" studying the online porn industry recently decided to live the dream bite the bullet, and create their very own adult site.

In their paper, which will be presented at The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard, the professors discovered that 43-percent of all the clicks they received on their homemade site were from browsers that were vulnerable to malware targeting Adobe Flash, Microsoft Office, or Adobe PDF documents. They also realized they could've turned a handsome profit if they'd agreed to use their site as a vehicle for a so-called Pay-Per-Install program, which would've offered them money in exchange for installing malware on targeted computers.

The research team, led by Glibert Wondracek, also built a web-crawler to analyze the content of almost half a million different adult URLs. They discovered that a full 3.23-percent of the pages studied "were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads." Three-percent might not seem like a lot, but that's about five times the average found by previous studies, and that number quickly mushrooms when you consider how many people access porn online, and the frequency with which they do it.

According to Wondracek and his study partners, the prevalence of X-rated malware is largely due to a lack of oversight. With nine out of every ten adult sites now free, most site owners make money through directing users to pay sites. So-called traffic brokers, meanwhile, are concerned solely with selling traffic to sites in their networks, and typically don't even bother inspecting their affiliated sites.

Ultimately, as Technology Review says, it's an economy built entirely upon "clicks and pennies." But it's probably not a model that could be implemented in other online media, simply because most other media isn't porn. As long as consumer demand remains so uniquely consistent, and as long as users continue to click away in the tireless pursuit of arousal, the system -- and its malware -- will continue to thrive.