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: phrases
Two men from Pennsylvania have set the record for most text messages sent in a month, with one man sending and receiving 217,000 total. Although both men were on an unlimited text messaging plan, one man, Nick Andes recieved a bill for $26,000 USD at the end of the month.
The bill was two inches thick.
“It came in a box that cost $27.55 to send to me,” Andes said. He immediately called T-Mobile after he “panicked” over the bill and the carrier has said they have credited the account and are looking into the charges.
Andes added that he has been texting for almost a decade and wanted to become the world record holder for most in a month. The previous record was 182,000, set by Deepak Sharma of India in 2005.
The second man, Doug Klinger, and Andes, set their phones to be able to send multiple messages and found they could send up to 6000 texts per day some days.
“Most were either short phrases or one word, ‘LOL’ or ‘Hello,’ things like that, with tons and tons of repeats,” added the men.
