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the internet is serious business

Emma Watson is the Most Dangerous Actress in Hollywood, to Computers

by Susana Polo | 2:01 pm, September 10th, 2012


Emma Watson‘s The Perks of Being a Wallflower comes out later this month, and while we’re a bit more excited for The Bling Ring, her flick where she’s the leader of a gang of bored rich teens who go on a cat-burglary spree (based on a true story), we’re sure that search traffic on her name is correspondingly up.

But according to security firm McAfee, that might be dangerous for the casual internet searcher.

McAfee does a yearly survey to find and compare ratios of malicious sites to legitimate ones in search results for various term, including celebrity names. Last year’s most dangerous woman was Heidi Klum, and according to The Examiner, we might also want to be on our guard when looking up Jessica Biel, Eva Mendes, Selena Gomez and Halle Berry.

But coming out on top? Harry Potter alumni Emma Watson. Right now, one out of every eight results on a search for “emma watson” is a malicious website. One might wonder why people who search for Watson would be so attractive a target for identity thieves and creators of malware this year, as opposed to others. Greater search notoriety indeed means that there will be a greater number of the less internet-literate looking at those results. Or is it something about the general demographic, not just the inflated one? Internet porn, for example, is a hotbed of malware. It would be unnecessary to point out that all of the above ladies should be judged on their career accomplishments rather than how many racy photoshoots they’ve done, but it would be unrealistic to discount the effect, on search traffic, of horny folk everywhere. Not everybody’s just looking for their IMDB page.

Safe surfing, everyone!

(via The Examiner.)

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  • Anonymous

    Someday a major provider like Google will offer a service to restrict results to verified sites that are monitored for malicious files or activity. That way a casual user could get the information they want without having to risk visiting an unknown site.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1416495457 Morgan Flood

    Emma Watson is a Harry Potter alumna….alumni is plural. (not to be excessively picky, just saying.)

  • Adam R. Charpentier

    It’s surprising that doesn’t exist already.

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