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Katrina Kaif not only sizzles on the silver screen, but the top Bollywood actress’ name has also now unwittingly become one of the most dangerous search keywords, as far as Indian net users are concerned.
While browsers use billions of keywords in different search engines like Google or Yahoo! Buzz, Katrina Kaif’s name stood out the second and was classified as the second most dangerous keyword for India. Cyber criminals and hackers create websites based on popular search keywords and persuade the browsers to download files carrying malicious software which could expose their personal and financial data, a study by McAfee, the world’s leading security technology company, found.
While browsers use billions of keywords in different search engines like Google or Yahoo! Buzz, Katrina Kaif’s name stood out the second and was classified as the second most dangerous keyword for India. Cyber criminals and hackers create websites based on popular search keywords and persuade the browsers to download files carrying malicious software which could expose their personal and financial data, a study by McAfee, the world’s leading security technology company, found.
The study to identify the most dangerous web searches found that in India the most dangerous search word was ‘Waptrick,’ a website for free downloads of music, ring tones, wall paper, animations and logos for mobile phones, followed by Katrina Kaif, Orkut, Yahoomail, Shahid Kapur, rediffmail, ‘How to earn money’, Namitha, Shimla and ‘Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.’
Maximum Risk
In its report titled ‘The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms’ released on Thursday, McAfee said cyber criminals maximised their profits by seeking the largest pool of possible victims with popular search terms about current events, gadgets and celebrities. The company researched more than 2,600 popular keywords to assess the degree of risk for each. The ‘Maximum Risk’ referred to the maximum percentage of risky sites a user might encounter on a single page of search results. The study found that the riskiest keyword world over was ‘screensavers’ with a maximum risk of 59.1 per cent as nearly six out of the top 10 search results for ‘screensavers’ contained malware.
Surprisingly, searches using ‘viagra,’ a popular keyword which is very common in spam mails, had lesser risky sites, the report said. Another interesting fact that emerged was that most used keywords which were also a risk pertained to working from home.
McAfee vice-president Jeff Green says: “Like sharks smelling blood in the water, hackers will create related websites laden with adware and malware whenever a particular top increases in popularity. Unsuspecting consumers are then tricked into downloading malicious software that leads them to blindly hand over their personal assets to cyber criminals.”
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