Top 15 most dangerous celebrities to search for online

McAfee owned SiteAdvisor often releases the list of celebrity names and or popular keywords that are most actively abused by malicious attackers in order to attract legitimate traffic to their malicious sites.

Based on their assessment, the simple act of browsing or searching for your favourite celebrity may expose you to everything the IT underground ecosystem has to offer – from serving adware and spyware to misleading offers and fake newsletters enticing you to opt-in into a spammer’s campaign.

In order of importance, the celebrities include:

Celebrity and Position in Maliciousness

1. Brad Pitt — When “Brad Pitt screensavers” was searched, more than Half of the resulting Web sites were identified as containing malicious Downloads with spyware, adware and potential viruses.

2. Beyonce — Inputting “Beyonce ringtones” into a search engine yields risky Web sites that promote misleading offers to gather consumers’ Personal information.

3. Justin Timberlake — Interest in his high-profile relationships makes him an easy target for spammers and hackers. When searching for “Justin Timberlake downloads”one Web site advertised free music downloads that were flagged as directly leading to spam, spyware and adware.

4. Heidi Montag — “The Hills” star is a popular search term when it comes to searching for wallpaper. A host of wallpaper Web sites contained hundreds of malware-laden downloads.

5. Mariah Carey — Spammers and hackers are using Mariah Carey screen saver Web sites to link to other sites proven to contain spyware, adware and other threatening downloads.

6. Jessica Alba — Red-ranked risky sites were identified when searching for “Jessica Alba” and “Jessica Alba downloads.” The sites contained hundreds of malicious downloads, links to other bad sites, misleading offers to gather information, and a high number of spam emails when an email address was provided.

7. Lindsay Lohan — This young Hollywood starlet is as dangerous to search online as she is famous. Searching for “Lindsay Lohan downloads” resulted in several dangerous Web sites laden with hidden adware.

8. Cameron Diaz — Cybercriminals use download Web sites related to Cameron Diaz’s image to link to other harmful sites containing spyware.

9. George Clooney, Rihanna — The technology found one Web site embedded with hundreds of dangerous wallpaper and photo downloads after inputting “George Clooney downloads.”

10. “Rihanna pictures” was also a risky search term, as McAfee identified a site that spammed its test email address.

11. Angelina Jolie — When “Angelina Jolie downloads” was searched, the software highlighted a risky site with 978 hidden malware-infected wallpaper and photo downloads, as well as links to other potentially dangerous URLs.

12. Fergie — A Fergie screen saver site was flagged as offering 111 risky downloads that could seriously compromise a PC’s privacy with unwanted spyware and adware.

13. David Beckham, Katie Holmes — The “David Beckham” search term generated a great deal of wallpaper and screen saver downloads veiled with malware. Consumers should also exercise caution when searching for “Katie Holmes” online — one download site advertised free screen savers that, if downloaded, would infect your computer with malicious programs like spyware.

15. Katherine Heigl — Hollywood’s big headliner in recent years is now susceptible to Internet lurkers too.”Katherine Heigl” was searched and a site was identified containing hundreds of malware-infected pictures.

The report further states;

“Cybercriminals employ numerous methods, yet one of the simplest but most effective ways is to trick consumers into infecting themselves by capitalizing on Americans’ interest in celebrity gossip,” said Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of McAfee’s Product Development & Avert Labs. “Tapping into current events, pop culture or commonly browsed sites is an easy way to achieve this. And because of Americans’ obsession with following celebrities’ lifestyles, they are an obvious target. We have to take precautions in casually navigating the Web since many subtle sites may be rife with malware for consumers’ computers.”

The Death of Michael Jackson was seized upon to propagate malware using the most unethical Blackhat SEO techniques.

Now, the Haiti earthquake has been capitalized upon to serve up malware. Innocent internet users searching for such innocuous terms as Haiti, or Earthquake using browsers like Internet explorer on google rapidly generates result pages with the top ten pages often being from malicious websites. These links are spoofed to look legitimate but when clicked redirects the user to a malicious website.
The latest technique now is to scam innocent people who want to donate to the relief effort. Click on a link and it redirects to a site where you are asked to provide your credit card details etc. Innocents, donate happily without realizing that they are being scammed.

Please watch your browsing!
SiteAdvisor can alert you to known phishing or malicious websites. Google Chrome also has an in-built malicious site alert mechanism.

McAfee SiteAdvisor can be downloaded quickly and for free at http://www.mcafee.com/siteadvisor. McAfee SiteAdvisor works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.