Dangerous search terms
A previous post was about McAfee’s list of dangerous celebrity names to search on. McAfee also compiles a general list of dangerous terms to search on. They are dangerous because cybercrooks like to load these sites with malware. The top offender is “screensavers”. A pretty good rule of thumb is to never download a screensaver unless you are very sure that it is safe. “Free software” is the next biggest source of problems. In fact, any term containing the word “free” is a target. At ZDNet, Dancho Danchev discusses the McAfee list and points out that static lists of search terms don’t include the whole story:
Furthermore, taking into consideration the fact that nowadays legitimate and compromised web sites serve more exploits and malware than the purely malicious ones (77% of Websites that carry malicious code are legitimate sites; Thousands of legitimate sites SQL injected to serve IE exploit; Over 1.5 million pages affected by the recent SQL injection attacks; Gumblar – approximately 17,000 compromised sites), a compromised web site’s index would undermine any such static lists of dangerous keywords to search for based on the diverse content that it’s providing.
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