When Free Will Cost You

Anti-virus software company McAfee has examined hundreds of thousands of websites and come up with a list of search terms that are most likely to land you on a page loaded with attack malware.

The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages. “Just in the past year, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware,” David DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, told Richard Quest for CNN International’s “Quest Means Business.” “It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks,” he said. Categories that had the highest risk of run-ins with malware: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news. Riskiest terms: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.

I’d google “word unscrambler” to see what that is, but now I’m afraid.