What you search online may be the most dangerous term

According to the recent report provided by McAfee Inc. some of the riskiest searches on the Internet today are associated either with finding items for free, such as music or screensavers, or looking for work that can be done from home. Cybercrooks deploy search categories like these to trick unwitting users into visiting their sites where they will be offered to download files carrying malicious software.

The report titled as “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms” says that cybercriminals maximize their profits by seeking the largest pool of possible victims with popular search terms about current events, gadgets and celebrities. Besides, with the know of the fact that people today are trying to save money and earn extra income hackers inject a great number of malicious search results targeted at them.

“Cybercriminals are smart,” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Product Development & Avert Labs. “Like sharks smelling blood in the water, hackers will create related Web sites laden with adware and malware whenever a particular topic increases in popularity. Unsuspecting consumers are then tricked into downloading malicious software that leads them to blindly hand over their personal assets to cybercriminals.” 

In the course of its study McAfee researched over 2,600 popular keywords (as defined by Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo! Buzz and others sources) to assess the degree of risk for each. Maximum Risk refers to the maximum percentage of risky sites a user might encounter on a single page of search results.

Thus, the riskiest set of keyword variations was “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1 percent. Nearly six out of the top 10 search results for “screensavers” contain malware. One of the single riskiest search terms in the world is “lyrics,” with a maximum risk factor of one in two. Surprisingly, searches using the word Viagra, a popular keyword that is also common in spam e-mail messages, yielded the fewest risky sites. Searches with the safest risk profile included health-related terms and searches about the current economic crisis.