Cameron Diaz, the most dangerous celebrity name on the internet, according to McAfee

Search string using Cameron Diaz now tops as the most dangerous celebrity name on malware bait list, according to Dave Marcus, McAfee’s director of security research and communication. Diaz’s name has a one-in-ten chance at getting a malicious result from search engines.

For the past three years, an antivirus company McAfee compiled search key words that contained names of popular celebrities, professional athletes, politicians, and other famous personalities and calculated the probability of search results flagged as dangerous by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor software.

SiteAdvisor is a free plug-in for Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Exporer that tags dangerous sites that contain malicious ware, adware, spyware and the like that comes out from the list of search results.

Diaz’ name has overthrown Jessica Biel which topped last year’s bait list. Biel now fell to the third on the McAfee’s list this year.

Search for “Julia Roberts and screensavers” placed second on the most dangerous list while supermodel Gisele Buenchen took fourth. Among the male celebrities, Brad Pitt is ranked as the highest search results tagged with malware. Pitt’s name is one of the only male names on the top 10 bait list.

“It’s a simple fact. The bad guys read the same news as the good guys,” said Marcus as he explained why some celebrities ranked higher than others.

Diaz’s surged to the top could be attributed to the fact that when McAfee compose the list, Cameron Diaz was in two blockbuster films, Knight and Day and Shrek Forever After.

Spammers and scammers alike would trade on the names of these celebrities to lure internet users into visiting malicioius sites, to open malicious emails, click on malicious links sent through Twitter messages, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and many other social networking sites.

Others on the dangerous list are: (The number preceding its name indicate its rank in McAfee’s 2010 list of most-dangerous search strings tagged with malware in search results)
14 Andy Roddick, tennis player
37 Lady Gaga, pop singer
46 Justin Bieber, teen singer
49 Obama, USA President
50 Sarah Palin, former US Governor

“We’re not saying stay away from searching for celebrities like Cameron Diaz,” said Marcus. “We’re saying be aware of the broad use of their names, and know that criminals are looking for a way to social engineer you, and this is the type of attack they’ll use.”

McAfee released the fourth annual most-dangerous celebrity list Thursday just minutes before it announced Intel was buying the company for nearly $8 billion. Before the interview with Marcus, a McAfee spokeswoman made it clear he would not take any questions about the acquisition.

Source: [Gregg Keizer,Computerworld]

2 Responses to “Cameron Diaz, the most dangerous celebrity name on the internet, according to McAfee”

Fredrick Kakaviatos on September 16th, 2010 at 1:46 am

Since I watched Cameron Diaz in the Mask movie, I found her graceful, attractive and heart-relaxing. I do love her so much.
alwaves on September 16th, 2010 at 6:13 am

she is simply awesome. I like her most in Knight and Day

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