While many people are very interested in the speed of search, they should be interested in the safety of what they are finding instead.
That’s what the guys at ZDNet concerned with security say, and I would agree. I see that they give a rating of “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms“. The list comes from McAfee, and lists the word ‘screensavers’ as the greatest danger to search for.
I can verify that, as I am somewhat a screensaver collector, and I look for them all the time. The very first thing I do, after downloading one, is scan with two different A-V engines, and many times, I must delete what I’ve downloaded, as there is some nastiness included with the file.
Upon searching for 2,658 unique popular keywords and phrases across 413,368 unique URLs, McAfee’s research concludes that lyrics and anything that includes ‘free” has the highest risk percentage of exposing users to malware and fraudulent web sites. The research further states that the category with the safest risk profile are health-related search terms.
So do you stop looking for those free items? No, but I would put free as a secondary, or tertiary term, which should cut down the number of fruitless searches (those ending with a delete of the results).
Other things searched for, which have lots of bad consequences –
Upon searching for 2,658 unique popular keywords and phrases across 413,368 unique URLs, McAfee’s research concludes that lyrics and anything that includes ‘free” has the highest risk percentage of exposing users to malware and fraudulent web sites. The research further states that the category with the safest risk profile are health-related search terms.
Here are more findings:
• The categories with the worst maximum risk profile were lyrics keywords (26.3%) and phrases that include the word “free” (21.3%). If a consumer landed at the riskiest search page for a typical lyrics search, one of four results would be risky
• The categories with the worst average risk profile were also lyrics sites (5.1%) and “free” sites (7.3%)
• The categories with the safest risk profile were health-related search terms and searches concerning the recent economic crisis. The maximum risk on a single page of queries on the economy was 3.5% and only 0.5% risky across all results. Similarly, even the worst page for health queries had just 4.0% risky sites and just 0.4% risk overall
The story is very interesting, and could help you keep your data safe, and your computer working smoothly. It is definitely worth your time taken to read.
Another thing – many have asked me about the double scan I mention above, as I have used it for quite a while. No one antivirus gets everything. However, you may have also heard that using two AV programs is bad, as they can interfere with each other. This is only partially true. What is being referred to is the memory-resident parts of the program. You can’t run two of these without some problems. So don’t try. Choose which one you want to run all the time, and then choose another, and install it without the memory-resident portion activated. (If you don’t know how to do this, don’t do it either – get some help.)
With that, you can use the on-demand scanning of each, and have no problems, yet one may catch something the other does not. Remember, there are false positives, but if you are not really familiar with what you are working with, don’t trust yourself; better to delete something that was okay, and be safe, than to not delete and have a problem in a matter of hours.
And before someone writes it – these are problems with Windows only, Linux or OS X users need not worry, as Trojans for Linux and OS X are few and far between,
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