First published: 30th September 2008
In a cynical marketing move, McAfee has named Brad Pitt as the Most Dangerous Celebrities in Cyberspace. In a press release that drips with celebrities' names, including Paris Hilton, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Heidi Montag, the company reports on data from its SiteAdvisor technology that, it claims, show that user searching for "Brad Pitt" and variants have an 18% chance of having their PCs infected with online threats, such as spyware, spam, phishing, adware, viruses and other malware.
Like McAfee's "Mapping the Mal Web" report, discussed in our June issue, the latest release also tries to attract attention by hyping unimportant details in a way that misleads ordinary readers. Paul Ducklin of Sophos criticises McAfee for failing to point out that malware-infected websites have a huge variety of themes, "The story seems to imply that if you steer clear of celebrities and stick to 'safer' subjects, you will greatly improve your online health. But SophosLabs finds an average of about 16,000 newly-infected web pages per day, liberally distributed throughout cyberspace".
Editor's note: in a cynical move to improve user education, this article uses celebrity names to attract attention. I hope you approve.