Cameron Diaz, trapped in limbo.
When you’re doing a lot of image searches, as I tend to do for this website during my daily update spree, you’re exposing yourself to some amount of risk. The hotter the celebrity name you search for, the more dangers you’re risking. Every year, McAfee puts together a list of the most dangerous celebrities to search for online, and the woman you see above you, Cameron Diaz, has topped a list of folks like Julia Roberts, Jessica Biel, Brad Pitt, and Knight and Day co-star Tom Cruise for the dubious honor.
Long story short, Cameron Diaz is hot stuff, both for interested web-surfers and malware-spreaders, who are using our Google-Fu against us. Dave Marcus, security researcher for Intel’s newest product McAfee says that while “consumers are getting smarter about searching online … cybercriminals are getting sneakier in their techniques. Now they’re hiding malicious content in ‘tiny’ places like shortened URLs that can spread virally in social networking sites and Twitter, instead of on websites and downloads.”
So why Cameron Diaz, who hasn’t had a hit movie in years? Who knows. She’s really the first superstar of the Internet era, so I figure she’s got just the right combination of current buzz and past history to make for maximum malware potential.
Tags: Cameron Diaz, McAfee, most dangerous celebrity name searches, unsafe celebrity searches, web browsing, internet security, malware search phrases, hackers, computer safety, Dave Marcus
