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Mcafee Publishes Top 12 Dangerous Keywords

Posted by Sultan | Posted in BlackHat, Google, MSN, Yahoo | Posted on 28-05-2009

Fig 1: Dangerous Searches

Mcafee, creators of arguably the most bloated antivirus and spyware software suite, has recently unveiled a list of the most dangerous keywords to look up in search engines. The list (fig 1) fills out various niches from the obvious downloadables like screensavers, free games, to celebrities, movies and prescription medication.

The topics are diverse, and except for webkinz – which I admittedly had to look up, all are relatively popular fields of interest with some that intertwine and overlap. BTW for those who can’t be bothered to look up webkinz, it’s some sort of virtual pet site for kids or tweens. The danger in these keywords stems from an increase in the volume of search spam doorway pages, that redirect to volatile pages contaning trojan and rootkit installers.

It’s no coincidence that many of the terms appearing in the list are amongst the most popular search terms on Yahoo and Google. Spyware peddlers are looking to game high traffic keyword terms to quickly cash in on growing trends and emerging interests. The first two results are synonmous with spyware and viruses, while the third “Work From Home” is notorious moreso for scams rather than spyware. Next we have Rihanna and Powerball, which must be event-centric meaning that a celebrity getting in the news and a spur in lottery winnings would have lead to an increase in the searches for those keywords and the traffic will more likely dwindle down when compared to the first three results which are perennial.

Webkinz looks to be a fad, and can be replaced with any number of emerging social network fads – bebo, orkut, twitter? More celebrity and time-based fads iPhone, Jonas Brothers, Barack Obama (which incidentally still hasn’t dwindled in search volume since the 2009 inauguration). Then lastly we have taxes, spurred by the April deadline for US tax returns – people looking for quick free software to help them do their taxes are easy prey for ppi (pay per installation) blackhatters.

Are these result surprising, not really consindering that due to International economic troubles more people are likely to turn to blackhat methods to generate some form of income.