DANGEROUS SEARCH WORDS

McAfee report enumerates the risk

SECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has released a study that examines the most dangerous search terms—those most likely to lead you to malicious sites that aim to steal personal data, install malware, or just bombard you with spurious pop-ups. The average risk rate is 1.7 percent (2 in 125 results are potentially risky), but it can reach over 25 percent if you search for particular things.

Some terms are pretty obvious targets: “free music downloads,” “make money,” and “game cheats,” for example, or anything with the words “free” or “lyrics” in them bring out the hackers. Other dangerous terms are a little harder to fathom: “myspace” and “solitaire.” The worst search string? At a risk of 16.1 percent, it is “word unscrambler.” Are puzzlers more trusting than most?

Diving deeper into the data and grouping together variations in terms brought out a clear winner: “screensavers.” Variations on this brought an average 34.4 percent risk. Another area full of scammers is “working from home”—four times riskier than average. Be wary of searching for “Rihanna,” too. Some results are odd, though: “viagra” turns out to be relatively safe, at 0.1 percent. A bit of fun for most perhaps, but some of these numbers are alarmingly high.