The word screensavers has topped the list of a McAfee study that set out to find what the web's most dangerous search terms were from a long list of surveyed keywords.
McAfee researchers found that from a total of 2,658 unique keywords, a number of relatively harmless looking terms were lurking in the list of 413,368 malware-laden urls.
The other thing to notice about the compiled list in the full McAfee research paper , is that despite the daily motherload of Viagra spam in our email boxes, the famous blue pill only managed to rate a miniscule 1.6% risk factor on the list. Even scammers know their limits.
But a number of popular culture icons have also been snared in malware and security attacks. Grammy award winning pop singer Rihanna scored 12.6%, while the teen vampire film Twilight had hackers sinking their teeth into their unsuspecting victims just 6.8% of the time.
Not to be left out, the popular web movement that grew around President Obama's campaign also resulted in the man himself earning a spot on the list at 6.2% (search term: President Obama), while the old adage that there's nothing free in life seemed to reflect malware-writers' behaviour with the search term 'free games' scoring second highest on the list with 24.7%.
But Apple fans shouldn't feel left out. The search term iPhone fielded 7.9% of high risk websites on the list of nasties, slightly higher than Obama's own presidental ranking.
Still, if there's any good news to come from all this, it's that bad news isn't necessarily the ideal place for hiding your sneaky malware. Highest on the list of McAfee's 'safe' search categories were keyword searches related to the current economic downturn.
Only 1.6% across all economic downturn/recession search catagories recorded a risk; some relief after you've just been told that your share porfolio is worthless.
From all this, we can conclude that web scammers and malware writers are targeting their search keywords against a Gen Y demographic who are more likely to be after a blng blang screensaver of their favourite president, some pumping Rihanna tunes and a free game or two for their iPhone. It's not just the hackers who have been reading the headlines lately.
