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June 04, 2007
Sex safer than music
Sex safer than music: Classic clickbaiting title, eh? McAfee studied top search placements for porn and tunes, and found that a fifth of highly-placed music sites contained malware, compared to a tenth of the highly-placed sex sites. Why? The hypothesis is that adult sites are financially self-sustaining, but "free" services need to recoup their expenses in other ways. Malware distributors will try to buy your attention: "The latest paper also found that sponsored search results, which are paid for by advertisers, are twice as likely to be risky as regular search results." The article notes that Google has gotten better in weeding out bad advertisiers over the last year, while Yahoo has gotten worse, but doesn't directly compare how many paid placements are from evil people. (Here's an alternate link, in case there's a subscription wall.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at June 4, 2007 08:57 AM
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