Movie fans who love to search what leading man Brad Pitt is up to need to beware of malware. Pitt's name is being used to lure Web surfers to malware-hosting sites, according to McAfee. Web surfers looking for wallpaper, ring tones, photos and screensavers are the main targets.
Typing Pitt's name in a search engine produces a one in five chance of hitting a malware site, according to McAfee. Other top search names used as lures include Angelina Jolie, Beyonce, Maria Carey, Jessica Alba, and George Clooney.
Each month, Internet users make more than 550 million clicks to risky Web sites, according to McAfee.
This is good news for criminals using "drive-by downloads" to spread malware, according to F-Secure, a security company. But it is not good news for Internet users typing in innocuous words such "knitting mittens," warns F-Secure.
A Growing Trend
Malware continues to be a problem, warn security experts. Last year, Google's malware team spent a year identifying Web pages that infect vulnerable hosts. What it found is alarming. Of the billions of URLs investigated, the team found more than three million unique URLs on more than 180,000 sites that automatically installed malware.
Google also looked at seven million URLs and mapped them to Open Directory Project or DMOZ categories and found that each was infected.
In 2007 McAfee detected 327 new sites per calendar day and 527 per business day. And the number is growing. Nearly 25,500 detections were added in 2007 compared to 2005 and 2006 combined, according to Jeff Green, McAfee's senior vice president of Avert Labs.
"Scary numbers any way you break them down," Green said in a McAfee blog. "One could almost say malware creation has reached epidemic proportions. We are seeing more malware than ever before, even though the lifespan of malware is decreasing."
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