Security

Online Pornography Is Safe!

Or at least not as dangerous as online music

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

4th of June 2007, 15:06 GMT

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A new study conducted by McAfee revealed that 9 percent of the porn websites are distributing spyware, spam or adware while 19 percent of the music pages are offering the same dangerous content. "The tier-one adult sites are doing phenomenally well as businesses, and because of that they very much have their house in order," said McAfee Senior Product Manager Mark Maxwell according

to the Los Angeles Times.

However, the surprising element comes from the search engines that seem to offer numerous sponsored results that are actually redirecting the visitors to malicious webpages containing spyware. The same source said that Yahoo was the most secure search engine because it hosts the safe unpaid results bundled with clean sponsored links.

"Yahoo came out best with 2.7% that were red or yellow, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com was the worst at 3.3%. The range was larger when it came to advertised results: from a low of 4.1% problematic results at Ask to 9% at Yahoo," Lost Angeles times added. This statistic is at least interesting because the search giant Google struggles to build a secure platform for the searchers and provide only safe results. The best example is represented by the two malware notifications displayed on the SERP page that informs users about the presence of dangerous elements on the websites. However, it's extremely difficult to track all the websites currently indexed by Google as the websites database is huge and stores an incredible number of pages.

"We are struck by search engines' failure to block even the most notorious and widespread of scam ads - a decision we suspect arises out of search engines' business objectives," the study's authors wrote as Los Angeles Times reported. "Google concentrates on Web pages that pose real danger to our users, and we are confident that we are protecting searchers from these threats," Google representative Katie Watson sustained.

TAGS:

music | malware | spyware

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