14 DAY TRIAL // Security researchers from Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender have analyzed recent spam messages and determined that Jay Leno is the celebrity most frequently mentioned in such campaigns.
"Jay Leno is the most dangerous Hollywood celebrity in cyberspace, according to analysis of 25 million spam messages by BitDefender," the company announces.
Leno has managed to overtake Madonna and Cameron Diaz, two celebrities whose names have long been used by spammers.
The top ten also includes Barack Obama, Stephen King and George Clooney, a significant change from the names seen in the past.
For example, David Beckham, Tiger Woods, Miley Cyrus, Meryl Streep and Kanye West have all been mentioned in recent spam runs, but did not make the top.
Surprisingly, common spam targets like Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie are nowhere to be seen.
"Cyber criminals follow the latest trends just as consumers do and they use these and the names of popular celebrities in their campaigns in order to lure people to websites that are full of malicious software (malware)," said Catalin Cosoi, head of the BitDefender Online Threats Lab.
"As a result, users searching for the latest videos or pictures can instead end up with a host of problems on their computer. We advise all users to have a strong internet security solution in place in order to combat the wide variety of online threats," he added.
BitDefender is not the only security company publishing celebrity-related statistics. McAfee releases an annual list of the "the most dangerous celebrities." Its top is not based on spam, but on the number of malicious pages that can be found by searching for a celebrity's name on Google.
Last year's most dangerous celebrity according to McAfee was Cameron Diaz. The American actress was followed by Julia Roberts and Jessica Biel. Jay Leno was not in the top ten.