McAfee warns of the risks, dangers, and threats posed by online song lyrics
Anne Hathaway was cute as a button with that guitar on NBC's Late Night last night, explaining to Jimmy Fallon how she was teaching herself to play by watching YouTube videos and searching for chords online. But kind friends need to warn her that one wrong step in her searches could lead to serious trouble. That's according to a recent report from security researchers at McAfee, who say that searches for some types of song information are most likely to lead to a nasty computer infection.
"The World's Most Dangerous Search Terms," released last week, says that searches on song lyrics returned, on average, one site in twenty that could (if visited) infect the guest's machine with some species of malware. In some cases, a page of search results might have an many as 25% of its results plagued with infection. That "maximum risk" number was the highest for any category the survey covered.
The study looked at approximately 2,658 popular non-porny keywords. (It's generally accepted that "adult" sites have high rates of infection, but McAfee was constrained both by the limitations of the source material -- Google doesn't include "those words" or certain other perennially popular search words in its Zeitgeist report, for instance, and McAfee made use of that report when selecting its own keywords -- and by McAfee itself, which presumably prefers not to issue NSFW business reports.) Data was drawn from most-popular lists kept by Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask and Hitwise. In addition, 12 ultra-popular keywords were put through Hitwise to find the 25 most popular variations for a 12-week period ending in late December.
The study found that overall, only about 1.7% of search results were risky. Besides "lyrics," the other very risky search term was the not-so-surprising "free."
The safest keyword categories were health-related search terms and searches related to the economic situation. When the research team ran the Hitwise search for keyword variations, "screensavers" delivered the worst results, with pages of search results delivering an average risk of 34.4%; on the worst results pages, 59.1% of the listings were unclean. (Weirdly, the keyword with the fewest infected search variations was "Viagra.")
Each category reveals a keyword that is, on average, the most dangerous thing you can search on in that realm. For the US, those words are irs stimulus checks (in the economics category), free music downloads (in "free"), phentermine (in health), lyrics (in lyrics), lowest (in shopping), and zelda twilight princess walkthrough (an outlier in the "Twilight" category; for searches actually connected to the cheesy movie, fanfic and reviews led the pack).
The study turned up, as these studies will, some weird and orthogonal data. For instance, the researchers couldn't resist noting that www.google.com was Googled nearly five million times during the late-2008 test period. Also, a number of search terms indicate to the jaded observer that some people are simply too woolly-headed not to be fleeced; it may be cruel to suggest that people who have to use a search engine to find the likes of MySpace, weather.com, hotmail.com, or msn.com (all actual searches) are less mentally adept than others, but it's hard not to wonder if they're adequately prepared to fend off purveyors of malware and other trouble. Or wolves.
Perhaps the saddest numbers in the survey related to people who are simply struggling to get by. Work from home searches, McAfee found, can be as much as four times more dangerous to incautious visitors than the average. Add the word "free" to the mix -- "free work from home," for example, or "work from home free" -- and on average between 11% and 12% of search returns are carrying some form of infection.
The complete paper, which will cause you to point and laugh at anyone who looks up popular hip-hop or R&B lyrics online and includes additional results from a number of countries elsewhere in the world, can be downloaded in PDF form from McAfee.