THE MOST DANGEROUS SEARCH TERMS ON THE WEB

The top 10 most dangerous internet search terms (The Telegraph)

The above is a  link to very interesting article from the UK Telegraph newspaper regarding some of the “most dangerous” words that can get web surfers into trouble. By “trouble”, they mean ending up on websites where there’s a very good chance that something nasty, better known as “malware” might end up being downloaded onto the visitor’s PC.

The list that they provide is a little UK-centric, but there’s a link to a McAfee (here it is – it’s a PDF file) study from 2008 which shows the most dangerous keywords from around the world, many of which one could imagine still being in use today.

Web surfing has always been a somewhat risky proposition. In most cases, surfers are going to be okay, because most of their surfing is done on “safe” sites, but the growth of search engine browsing has been accompanied by a huge growth in sites that exist simply to respond to the latest online trends in order to infect computers with spyware, keystroke loggers, trojan horses…you name it.

The “top 10” from 2008 include some very run-of-the-mill keywords:

1. Lyrics
2. Free
3. Web
4. Gear, Gadgets and Games
5. Olympics
6. Videos
7. Celebrities
8. Music
9. News
10. Miscellaneous

From a personal perspective, the scary thing is that having security software installed doesn’t mean automatic protection any more. A recent piece of malware pops up a box in the lower right part of the screen that looks a lot like anti-virus software and tells the user to “click to scan”. That click, in essence, gives the software the permission to access the computer, circumventing (in most cases) the security and then disabling it.

Security is a game of cat-and-mouse. Anyway, the above are interesting articles and worth a read. If you don’t have security software installed then all I can say is “wow”. I would consider supplementing the traditional security suite type of application with a malware checker such as MalwareBytes’ Anti Malware or something along those lines (Spysweeper etc). As far as I’m concerned, you can’t get enough protection.

Safe surfing!