Cyber crooks exploit risky searches

By Staff Writer for Trellix
Johannesburg, 14 Jul 2009

Search categories associated with finding things for free, or work that can be done from home comprise some of the riskiest searches on the Internet today.

This is according to McAfee's report 'The Web's most dangerous search terms', which describes how cyber criminals maximise their profits by seeking the largest pool of possible victims with popular search terms involving current events or celebrities.

Cyber criminals use these search categories to lure unsuspecting consumers to their Web sites and are often able to persuade searchers to download files carrying malicious software.

During the recession, McAfee observed a growing number of malicious search results targeted at people who want to save money or earn extra income working at home.

"Cyber criminals are smart," says Jayson O'Reilly, McAfee regional manager for Africa. "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 cyber criminals."

McAfee researched more than 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.

As defined by McAfee, the riskiest set of keyword variations was 'screensavers' with a maximum risk of 59.1%. Nearly six out of the top 10 search results for 'screensavers' contain malware.

Another of the single riskiest search terms is 'lyrics', with a maximum risk factor of one in two. Searches using the word Viagra, a popular keyword that is also common in spam e-mail messages, yielded the fewest risky sites, the report stated.

Searches with the safest risk profile included health-related terms and searches about the current economic crisis.

According to the report, consumers looking to save money or searching for means of additional income should be careful: searchers clicking on results that contain the word 'free' have a 21.3% chance of infecting their PCs with online threats, such as spyware, spam, phishing, adware, viruses and other malware.

'Work from home' searches can be as much as four times riskier than the average risk for all popular terms.