According to security company McAfee, actress Cameron Diaz is used most often as malware bait, with search strings using her name having a ten percent chance of coming up with an infected site.
Dave Marcus, McAfee’s director of security research and communication says searching for “Cameron Diaz and screensavers” increases that rate to 20 percent.
McAfee, as it has done since 2007, compiled the search phrases containing names of celebrities, athletes and politicians trying to calculate the percentage of sites that are tagged as dangerous.
Diaz surpassed Jessica Biel, last year’s “champion,” who fell to third place. Julia Roberts took second, while Gisele Buendchen and Brad Pitt rounding out the list.
“It’s a simple fact. The bad guys read the same news as the good guys,” said Marcus.
Marcus also explained why Diaz jumped so high, as the McAfee list was composed during the month where two of her films were in theaters, “Knight and Day” and “Shrek Forever After.”
Phishers and attackers use the names to trick unsuspecting users into visiting malicious sites, which then installs malware on their computers.
Result for: Computer
Intel has agreed today to stop unfair practices including using threats and giving unfair discounts to block out rivals.
The company settled with the FTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) without paying any fine and without admitting any wrongdoing.
Furthermore, Intel pledged to give its rivals access to processor technology for the next six years.
Intel had been sued by Nvidia and rival AMD over the unfair practices. The Nvidia case is still pending.
The chip-maker has 80 percent of the microprocessor market.
“It’s a landmark settlement that really will have a striking effect on improving competition in the market,” says former FTC policy director David Balto.
Intel is now banned from “retaliating” against computer makers if they chose to do business with AMD or other non-Intel suppliers.
The European Union, Korea and Japan have all, over the past couple of years, accused Intel of similar unfair/anti-trust practices.
Result for: Computer
Marking a first, an unemployed 31-year old has been arrested in Japan this week for sharing unauthorized TV shows via BitTorrent.
The arrest is the first ever in Japan for torrent use.
Shuichiro Tanaka of Saitama Prefecture was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s cyber crimes division for allegedly uploading and sharing TV shows.
The authorities said that from June 4th to 9th, Tanaka captured the programs using his computer then uploaded them via BitTorrent.
Over the course of the year, Tanaka allegedly uploaded 165 episodes of different shows such as “Waratte Iitomo” and “Genius! Shimura Zoo.”
When asked why he uploaded the shows, Tanaka plainly said: “I did it for people who missed the programs. Because there is a potential for viruses on Winny [another popular Japanese peer-to-peer file sharing program] and others, I used BitTorrent, which I heard police weren’t investigating.”
