Searching for news, pictures, videos and downloads of Rihanna could put your PC at risk of malware infection, according to security software firm McAfee Labs.
This is because like many celebrity related keywords, the RnB and pop star has been the focus of blackhat search engine optimisation on hundreds of malware sites. Of course, celebrity keywords are far from the exclusive target of such cyber criminals.
McAfee’s “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms” found, for example, that for some keywords like “popular screensavers,” the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) can contain three hazardous links out of every four results. In fact, “screensavers” was the riskiest set of keyword variations seen by McAfee – an average risk of 34.4% risky sites in SERPs generated by terms related to this keyword.
This risk level stood significantly higher than the average risk level for all results pages – just 1.7%. Surprisingly though searches for “Viagra” – given its prevalence in spam advertising – yielded the fewest number of risky sites in SERPs.
According to McAfee, searching for Rihanna online leads to a maximum 12.6% chance of visiting a website with threats such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware hazards. Hackers are most successful when they can attract a large number of victims,” says the report, “One way to target big crowds online is to track current events – everything from celebrity meltdown and natural disasters to holidays and popular music.”
“Broadly speaking, this study confirms that scammers consider popular trends when deciding which victims to target,” say the authors in the conclusion. “If hackers are now motivated largely by profit, the biggest profits can be wrung from the largest pools of potential victims.” In short, like the search engine marketing and SEO industry, hackers have realised that “popular trends and visitor traffic are highly correlated.”
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