Unless you work for or own an online business, chances are you’ve never heard the terms “search engine optimization” (SEO) and “search engine marketing” (SEM). Yet these two phrases—SEO (the effort by site owners to get their website ranked higher by search engines) and SEM (the use of paid advertising to gain prominent placement on search engines) are increasingly important vocabulary for businesses that seek to prosper on the web. Unfortunately, legitimate businesses are not the only ones gaining fluency with this new language. The cyber criminals, from singular ones to organized groups, have realized that the same search engines that enable legitimate businesses to reach more consumers can also be used by criminals to separate more victims from more of their money.

In a study conducted by McAfee, Inc., they have identified that the riskiest set of keyword variations was “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1% and an average risk of 34.4%, substantially higher than expected averages. Consumers looking to save money, and/or searching for means of additional income, should take note: searchers clicking on results that contain the word “free” have a 21.3 percent chance of infecting their PCs with online threats, such as spyware, spam, phishing, adware, viruses and other malware. “Work from home” searches can be as much as four times riskier than the average risk for all popular terms.

How does one keyword differ from another one, in terms of cyber weightage. The difference in two keywords is exactly its search engine results based costing, and has a direct relationship towards the number of searches made per day. Though it is difficult to understand the motives and modus of most of the cyber criminals, they also think of themselves as successful provided they can lure more victims to these phishing site. Mostly victims are coaxed into downloading a computer program into their system. People of any walks of the life, and any age group could get duped. As people continue to convert their music collection into mp3 and other digital format, they struggle between the cost of buying and converting. And once they are ready to download off the Internet, they are atleast prepared to download something, and this makes the malware authors work eaiser.

In 2006, a study by University of Washington researchers found game and celebrity sites that “… appeared to pose the greatest risk for piggybacked spyware, while sites that offer pirated software topped the list for drive-by attacks”. That same year, Microsoft filed suit against a company it alleged was using celebrity screensavers to distribute spyware, saying, “Many of these programs are presented as screen savers showing pictures of well-known celebrities such as Jessica Simpson. However, defendants’ programs included much more than pretty pictures. Once installed, the software would ‘call home’ and surreptitiously download numerous other programs that bombard users with unwanted pop-up advertisements, track users’ Internet activity, redirect their Internet browsers to unwanted pages, add icons to the Microsoft Windows desktop, and change the users’ Windows Registry settings. Microsoft alleges that these programs were downloaded and installed without appropriate notice to or consent from users. Notably, defendants’ software installs even if users try to stop installation by choosing the appropriate options.”

Trend Micro reported finding scams targeting job-seekers. Given the difficult global economy, we are not surprised that scammers would zero in on this growing pool of victims. Similarly, Gary Warner, a computer forensics researcher, found scammers using the U.S. economic stimulus to target victims. Symantec also found stimulus come-ons in email that, if answered, could lead to loss of personally identifiable information and identity theft. Digg, the very popular news site, was reportedly the victim of hundreds of thousands of fake comments that drove visitors to websites hosting malware. An independent security researcher named Shanmuga analyzed a file that promised new video of Paris Hilton but was in fact a lure to inject viewers.

Since 2006, after getting affected by spyware and malware several times, and reinstalling Windows XP almost every fortnight for about seven or eight times, I switched to Ubuntu desktop as my primary operating system. Ever since that, I have never had to have a reinstallation, other than when I switched my desktop for a more advanced system, and badly wanted the 64bit advantage. Though there are difficulties, and tough situations where one cant find a comparable application in Linux, for most of the personal use, I find Ubuntu Desktop a good choice. The technical and statistical data have been aggregated from McAfee report ‘The most dangerous keword to be searched’.