The most dangerous searches on the World Wide Web have less to do with bomb recipes and ATM hacking instructions and more to do with NASCAR idols and baby ducklings.
The phrase “free screensaver” has been named one of the most dangerous search terms on the Net, according to a new McAfee study that took a look at the threat search engines pose to user security.
Although the study found that only 5% of search results on average contain some sort of risky link (spam, malware, spyware, viruses, etc.), some analysts wonder if the search engines are doing enough to combat this growing threat.
From a story in WebProNews:
“Sponsored sites were from two to four times as dangerous as organic results, meaning that malicious site owners are paying to attack unprotected visitors…We considered the first five pages of results for each keyword from each of the five biggest search engines: Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and Ask. Out of those search engines, MSN proved the safest with only 3.9 percent of results proving unsafe or risky. Yahoo followed at 4.3 percent, and there was a tie between AOL and Google, 5.3 percent; that duplication is likely due to AOL using Google search results. Ask proved the least safe of the group, with 6.1 percent results in the test being unsafe.”
View the full report here, complete with pretty charts and graphs and then read about the convicted hacker who may be forced by the US government to hand over his DNA.
And you thought kitten screensavers were scary…
