Sun 14 Jun 2009
Security company McAfee has examined 2,600 popular search terms, and analyzed over 400,000 Web pages, to find the most dangerous words to search on in the search engines. Some of the riskiest terms are
free music downloads, screensavers, free games, Olympics, work from home, videos, news, music, celebrities, free ringtones and free games.
About 20% of surfers who search on these terms will end up at a malicious site that will put malware on their computer, says McAfee. You should avoid searching on these risky terms.
Or if you do, make very sure all your security programs are running and are up to date. At a very minimum, you must have an antivirus program, as well as a firewall and a spyware remover.
Even scarier, the company goes on to mention that 50% of the world’s PCs are not protected.
Here is another tip, while I think of it. Do not mention on a blog or on the social networking sites that you are going on vacation. The crooks watch for these vacation notices, and may clean out your house while you are gone. Instead, tell everyone about your trip when you get back.
June 14th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Hi Syd,
You rightly said that you should not announce that you are going on a vacation.
I still remember the incidence when a webmaster announced that on his blog, and while he was away, his blog was hacked and even transferred to a different account. He had a lot of difficulty in getting back the domain.