I know many of you don’t think about the dangers that can appear when you are typing a keyword in the search field. But if you are a newbie and you have no technical and security knowledge than you should be aware on the keywords you are using for your searches because there is one step away of getting a nice computer infection. That’s why a good antivirus is always the best option.

Hacker’s success is based on the large amount of people they can attract. That’s why they are searching for the trends and watch for the people needs. A well known antivirus company, Mcafee, had made some researches related to the top dangerous keywords used for searches. They have searched for more than 2600 popular keywords and for each keyword they have examined the first five pages of results across each of five major search engines. This means more than 413000 unique URLs checked. Keywords were ranked in two ways: the average risk of the results and the maximum risk of the riskiest page of results. A general conclusion was that “lyrics” and anything that includes “free” has the highest risk percentage of exposing users to malware and fraudulent web sites.

From the most popular searches, it seems that the keyword “screensaver” is the most dangerous with maximum risk of 59.1 percent. In the image below you can see other keywords that reveal a high infection risk. (Source)

We can’t really understand how do scammers operate and why some keywords are riskier than others, but what we can do is to install good security suites and to learn some essential basis related to our online security.