Posted on 05/24/2006 5:04:26 AM PDT by 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?
Spyware and ad ware? I now use the Proxomatron to stop pop ups, but before whenever I accessed lyrics websites, I got a message saying that 'pups' were downloaded to my harddrive and I had to manually delete them. My virus software McAfee wouldn't automatically delete the 'pups'.
Glad to hear you don't have any such problems. Which reminds me, time to run another virus check soon.
How ironic! I just got a 'pup' alert after posting that message. How did THAT happen?!
"This place hasn't given me any trouble;
http://www.lyricsdownload.com/blue-oyster-cult......"
-- -- --
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I got an immediate Active X attempt warning just clicking your link to that site. The site is also loaded with ringtone downloads, also another tipoff that it is as filthy as a democrat.
Oh crap.
Neither Zone Alarm or AntiVir made a peep about it.
Sorry about that, seriously.
Hope nothing happened to your PC because of me.....:(
I have asked the Mods to delete the post with the link on it, just in case.
Thanks for the heads-up.
According to that McAfee Site Adviser somebody posted, the site summary says;
lyricsdownload.com
We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems.
So nobody got any bad bugs, thank heaven.
They must have changed their policy since about a year ago. The version I have removes the files, at no cost. To get updates for the latest viruses you have to pay and to get the full version with automatic behind the scenes monitoring and configuration for custom apps. I'm sorry I did not know they had changed.........
Specific case example: my husband and I both have desktop computers at home. They both live behind our router, which protects us from hackers. On my computer, I run simply Norton Antivirus and typical programs like Word, IE, Netscape, and a few games. On his computer, he runs all the anti-spyware, anti-popup, anti-whatever software. His computer has more virus-like symptoms than mine. Coincidence? Maybe, but I know of many other examples like this. I honestly think that spyware and viruses piggyback on common anti-spyware type software. Do I have proof? Nope.
pup: Potentially unwanted program. It is a message I get from my anti-virus software.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/pups/configuration.aspx
Just curious if you googled those potentially dangerous searches that are the subject of this thread, what would happen on your computer. Maybe you are just visiting very 'safe' sites and your anti-virus software works fine. I am surprised you don't get pop-ups from some of the attachments on FR.
You don't want to be too naive about viruses either. My son, the computer guru showed me all kinds of (benign) programs such as adware that was resident on my hard drive. They are not viruses per se, but how did they get there. The definition of a "virus" is often different for different people, too. "Virus" doesn't have to mean invasive and harmful to the computer.
Weren't they the three guys who walked through the furnace and weren't burned?
dialer
I don't consider myself naive - my job every day is programming on computers, so I consider myself pretty savvy. I know a lot more than your average joe, anyhow. But I do think that a lot of people engage in activity that puts them at risk without knowing specifically which things they are doing that are risky. And if someone hasn't ever looked at their security settings in their browser, they are probably putting themselves at risk too.
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