Risky Web searching

Tell your kids not to search for "free screensavers" in any search engine. Of course, secure Web searching goes much deeper than that, but those are the "most dangerous words to search" in terms of bad stuff that gets downloaded from bad Web sites, the BBC reports. The BBC is referring to a new study on this sponsored by PC security firm McAfee. "It is well known that visiting sites offering porn, gambling and free MP3s leaves users at serious risk of falling victim to spyware and adware," according to the BBC. "However, the research by Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum reveals that those carrying out searches for innocuous subjects are at risk too." Searchers should be very careful when searching for any free downloads like ringtones and screensavers. The results from searches for file-sharing sites like "Bearshare" and "limewire" are also extremely risky. The other two terms on the most-risky list are "WinMX" and "download Yahoo Messenger." The danger we're talking about here is that the sites these searches lead to might download to the family PC something else altogether: software code that logs your every keystroke (and thus captures user names, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) or enables malicious hackers to take control of your PC (in a way that's tough to detect). [Here's my earlier coverage on "SiteAdvisor," the software the study's authors used to tell them whether it's safe to click on links to specific sites.]