All-Star Game of Spyware
Posted by Jonathan Cohen on July 5, 2006 05:42 PM
MLB's greatest players and teams ranked by the danger of their screensaver searches
Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, and Albert Pujols are household names for any baseball fanatic. They also lead the pack of the most hazardous players in McAfee's survey of the most risky baseball screensaver searches. We tested each of Major League Baseball’s 1,224 players by passing their names through Google and adding the word screensaver. Search results were enhanced by our database of 4.5 million Web safety ratings.
Searching for screensavers for Bonds, Jeter or Pujols and clicking on one of the results will give a PC a .600 "Earned Risk Average" (ERA) – in other words, a 60% chance of landing at a dangerous site. Josh Fogg of the Colorado Rockies is the only player to score higher, with 75% of his results tainted by sketchy behavior and software. Nearly three hundred players scored 30% or worse. The average ERA for the entire league was 18%.
The tech community knows that screensavers are prime candidates for adware bundles. The average Web consumer, however, is being taken advantage of. According to Yahoo's keyword selector tool Yahoo! had roughly 3.5 million searches in May for "screensaver," "wallpaper" and related search terms. Given that Yahoo accounts for 23% of all searches, an estimated 15.1 million total searches for these desktop visual enhancements are conducted each month.
How unsafe is it to search for your favorite player? Find out the stats in McAfee SiteAdvisor’s All-Star Game of Spyware Survey.
