Beware of searching for lyrics

2009-06-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

McAfee research identifies riskiest Internet search terms.

According to a piece of research undertaken by McAfee, the word ‘lyrics’ is one of the riskiest terms to enter into a search engine. The study looked at more than 2,600 popular keywords and assessed the first five pages of results for each on five major search engines. As defined by McAfee, the search term ‘lyrics’ comes with a maximum risk factor of one in two. Meanwhile, nearly six out of the top 10 search results for ‘screensavers’ were found to contain malware, and results that contained the word ‘free’ were found to have a 21.3% chance being malicious. The full report can found at http://us.mcafee.com/en-us/local/docs/most_dangerous_searchterm_us.pdf.

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