Free isn't free: the true cost of music and movie downloads

David Heath
Thursday, 16 September 2010 22:56

Your IT - Entertainment

Searching for online music or video content is already fraught with danger.  Add the word 'free' to your search and you're very likely to land on a malicious site.

McAfee's latest study, "Digital Music and Movies Report" paints a grim picture of the state of the Internet.

According to the report, researchers outlined several specific threats including the threat of "free" software, MP3s and streaming video, dangerous fan pages and malicious ads that appears even on well-established, reputable web sites.  The research found that adding the word "free" to a search for music ringtones resulted in a three-fold increase in the riskiness of the sites returned by major search engines in English.  The word "free" in other languages yielded similar results.

Furthermore, searching for "MP3s" added risk to music search results, while searching for "free MP3s" made those searches even riskier.  Even when a consumer indicated that they wanted to pay for the MP3 in their search, results still sent them to pirated content.

Noting that younger Internet users were likely to be far less savvy than their older siblings or parents, the report observed that cybercrooks were targeting the young with highly specific spam email with topics related to Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.

The report notes a number of significant trends:

"Free" can be costly: Adding the word "free" to a search for music ringtones results in a three-fold increase in the riskiness of the sites returned by major search engines in English.  Translating "free" to the appropriate foreign language word had similar results in other native search engines.

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