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Unsafe Searching
Chris Crum
Staff Writer
2006-05-12
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
McAfee released a report today regarding online safety related to the use of the major search engines.
The study points out the potential danger of web sites that are reached by means of search engine results pages (SERPs). The study parallels the advice recently given by Roger Thompson of Exploit Prevention Labs.
McAfee's study ran from January to April and focused on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask. It showed that popular keyword searches were just as risky as any others.
McAfee tested such popular keywords as "free screensavers," "digital music," "popular software," and "singers." They found that 72% of the results for these led to "dangerous sites".
"Search engines clearly play a critical role in Internet use: As a convenient starting point for online browsing, they're estimated to account for about half of all site visits," said Chris Dixon, who heads the McAfee SiteAdvisor product team.
"But economically motivated purveyors of spam, adware and other online problems quickly follow where consumers go online, in this case directly to search engine results," continues Dixon. "Today, based on browsing trends, we estimate that U.S. Internet users make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month through search queries."
According to the study, sponsored results are more dangerous than non-sponsored results with about 8.5% of sponsored links found to be dangerous.
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About the Author:
Chris Crum is a staff writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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