Want to know a quick way to make money with your Web site? Don’t care much about ethics? Have I got a deal for you.

In the current issue of Information Week, I found a little story toward the back about something that makes me happy as hell to be using a Macintosh. iframeDollars.biz pays owners of sites to infect your computer with adware and spyware--and, on a high traffic site, the payouts can be pretty impressive.

iframeDollars.boz says it pays Webmasters to place a one-line exploit on their sites. The code exploits a number of patched Windows and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, including some that go back as far as 2002. Systems that haven’t been updated would be vulnerable to the exploit. According to analysis done by the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center, the exploit drops at least nine pieces of malicious code--including back doors, other Trojans, spyware, and adware--on any PC whose user surfs to a site that hosts the exploit code.

The company pays $61 per thousand infections to site owners willing to screw their own viewers.

Here’s my suggestion: don’t visit warez sites, porn sites, free music sites, or any other site that you really aren’t completely sure about. Surf with Firefox or something other than Internet Explorer except when you need specific services that IE provides--and then only surf known and trusted sites. Keep your security settings in the preferences closer to “paranoid” than to “naive.”

You might also want to read Information Week’s Security Center regularly to find out all the different ways that the unscrupulous are trying to make your computing life miserable.