Music and tech searches risker than porn

Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 June 2007 15:58

Your IT - Home IT

Conventional wisdom has it that visiting adult sites is likely to result in malware being downloaded onto your computer - but a new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor operation suggests that other virtual neighbourhoods are more dangerous in this regard.

According to reports in various US publications and the Associated Press, the study looked at the proportion of search results that point to hazardous pages, using results from the AOL, Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines for a list of over 2000 common queries derived from sources such as Google Zeitgeist, Hitwise and Yahoo Buzz.

Keywords relating to adult sites returned a fairly risky nine percent of hazardous pages (up from eight percent last December), but music related queries - including those for peer-to-peer software - were even worse, returning 19 percent dangerous results.

The most dangerous search term was said to be 'bearshare' - not surprising, as at least one version of that program was packaged with malware.

Other risky searches include those for screensavers and wallpaper.

There is some good news. Overall, only four percent of search results point to hazardous pages, compared with five percent in the December 2006 report. Sponsored links are still more dangerous than 'organic results' at just under seven percent, but are down from eight percent in the previous study.

SiteAdvisor is an add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer that flags search results on a green/yellow/red scale according to the prevalence of malware, receipt of spam after registration, and links to other 'bad' sites. The study treated yellow and red pages as hazardous.