The Most Dangerous Words on the Web [Searches that invite viruses]

ABC News ^ | May 23, 2006 | Ned Potter

[cloud8]

Don't try this at home--not if you want to have a working computer. Search for "Free Screensavers," we're told, and 64% of the sites you'll find are the kinds that can gum up your machine with spyware or a computer virus.

A team of researchers, let by Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum of a British firm called Site Advisor, tried entering 1,394 popular search terms into the web's most popular search engines--Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask.com. They came up with a chart you may find both amusing and sobering. Even if you search for something as harmless as "I love you," they report, 19.7% of the links they found on Google were ones they would rate as "red" or "yellow" on their scale of riskiness for malware of some sort or another.

Here's their list of the eight most dangerous search terms:

1. Free screensavers
2. Bearshare
3. Screensavers
4. Winmx
5. Limewire
6. Download Yahoo Messenger
7. Lime wire
8. Free ringtones

If you follow your own common sense--keep your antivirus software up to date, don't download software offered by a weird site you don't know--you'll probably be fine. Serious searches seem quite safe (I was grateful, personally, to see that "Peter Jennings" scored 0%), but even if you look for "God," say Edelman and Rosenbaum, 1.2% of the hits you'll get could cause you trouble. (Sponsored links--the ones paid for by advertisers--tended to be somewhat riskier to visit than "organic" ones--the ones the search engine found on its own.)

Edelman has posted more HERE. He describes himself as a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard, having already gotten his law degree there.

Don't you hate bright people?

[trebb]

Make sure you also have a firewall (the one built in to XP is sufficient if you are also careful about how you conduct your business).

There is no magic bullet to protect yourself - while many apps are very good at catching new threats, and some of them are pretty good at detecting malicious attributes to brand new threats, there are a bunch of folks out there doing a lot of development to try to wreak havoc on your computer. The best bet is to install some good protection (anti-virus/firewall/spy-ware) and then don't get complacent. If you don't act as if you are vulnerable, you are likely to take a hit somewhere down the road. Eternal vigilance is imperative (in so many things)

Good luck

[cloud8]

> Warez is one you want to stay away from as well.

Fer sure. u r l33t, d00d.

[ziggy_dlo]

where you can download music from the internet for free from other users.
Its one large network.
but three different things

[ziggy_dlo]

Win MX is Windows Music

[cloud8]

In addition to what others have suggested, apply constant maintenance.

[The_Victor]

Sponsored links--the ones paid for by advertisers--tended to be somewhat riskier to visit than "organic" ones--the ones the search engine found on its own.

Now that's really interesting....

[BraveHeart72]

You're right, a lot of those Web Sites with song lyrics on them have malicious intent that I would stay clear from. My suggestion when looking up song lyrics in the future would be to search for them on the newsgroups where you shouldn't get bombarded with viruses, spyware, adware and other assorted nasty stuff.

[The_Victor]

I use Spybot, Ad-aware and Free AV. Are there any other suggestions of apps that might catch the odd virus?

There is also a new second edition beta version of Windows Defender from Micro$oft.

[Salamander]

It was always a variant of a particular trojan downloader that *nothing* would get rid of.
I had to FDISK everytime.

I don't even understand why they'd put stuff like that in something as banal and harmless as lyrics pages.

[ShadowAce]

[tlb]

Safe lyrics site, been using it for three years.

http://www.top40db.net/

WinMX is a useful utility if you use it with common sense. Look at just what sort of file you are getting. An exe or scr file download is just begging for a virus. A blocker like Peerguardian 2 filters out most of the fake file hosts RIAA tries to flood the system with.

[evets]

1. stuned
2. beeber
3. hugh
4. series
5. Kournikova

[VOA]

bump

[diamond6]

Yahoo Messenger!!!! I have that, didn't encounter any problems........at least I think.

[Salamander]

Thanks but it's pretty limited for my particular musical tastes.

This place hasn't given me any trouble;

http://www.lyricsdownload.com/blue-oyster-cult-lyrics.html

[that particular link has every BOC song ever recorded, for example]

"http://www.lyricsdownload.com/blue-oyster-cult-lyrics.html"

I never download *anything* that doesn't have something to do with software updates for programs that I already have, such as Photoshop and the like.

My [ex]doctor's office computer was cheerfully running a screensaver that I knew was a trojan.

The receptionist just looked freaked out when I told her but I don't know what, if anything, they ever did about it.

[zeugma]

Too late. Wanted a nifty Christmas screensaver, and now I'm inundated with spam : (

Instead of a screensaver, why not put your idle CPU cycles to work. See the Freeper Folding thread for details. 

 Our FreeRepublic team of 325+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).

[Turbopilot]

There's a neat utility called SiteAdvisor by McAfee (the antivirus folks) that tries to solve just this problem. It runs as an extension to your web browser and has two functions. When you run a search, SiteAdvisor will insert an icon by each search result - green if the site is okay, yellow or red if there is something to be wary of. You can mouse over the icon to get more details about a potential problem without loading the link. Here's a sample screenshot:

The software also inserts an icon in your toolbar showing the status of the page you're currently on.:

It's available for free download at http://www.siteadvisor.com for Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers.

[InterceptPoint]

I installed McAfee SiteAdvisor a couple of weeks ago and highly recommend it. It's free and you can get it here:

McAfee SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor catalogs websites based on their relative safety. Once installed you get a green, yellow or red flag for every link when you do a google search. Stay away from those sites with red flags. I tried it out with "free screensavers" and you do get a bunch of bad sites being identified.

[cloud8]

> It's available for free download at http://www.siteadvisor.com for Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers.

Thanks for the tip. $69.99 will get you the heavy protection of Norton Internet Security 2006.

[Kaylee Frye]

Oh come on. Anybody can right click on the file before opening it and run a quick virus search. And if you're getting executables anyway, you better know you're putting your computer at risk. These viruses can't be passed along with music files. And (at least with Winmx), you won't get any files downloaded that you didn't specifically click on to download.

People go on and on about viruses magically appearing on their computer from some internet-type software (it ranges from IE to Winmx to Instant Messenger), but honestly, unless you're doing something stupid (like actually allowing people to just put things on your computer), there is no way to just magically get a virus from any of these kinds of software.

Sorry for going off there, but people's fear of the unknown and viruses just gets old to me.