• The study deemed the search term “screensavers” as the most dangerous keyword to use in public search engines, because it returned a maximum risk of about 59 percent.
• Entering the word “lyrics” in any phrase in a public search engine returns one risky site for every two search results.
• Any employee who clicks on a search engine result that contains the word “free” has nearly a 22 percent chance of infecting your company’s computers with threatening material like spyware, spam, adware, viruses or other malware.
• The least risky search terms are health-related topics and searches about the recent economic downturn—these items have only a 0.4 percent maximum risk.
It is essential to remember that the list of dangerous search terms is ever changing. Hackers want to impact the highest amount of people with the least amount of effort, so they aim for the key search terms used most. Ill-intentioned hackers also adapt quickly to the fast-paced nature of the Internet and the public circle, so oftentimes social or celebrity events popular at a given moment climb quickly to the top of the Internet’s most dangerous search terms list and are a high risk for infecting your company’s computers.
