Priyanka Chopra has been named McAfee’s Most Dangerous Celebrity in Indian cyberspace this year.
The result was compiled from the co.in search results.
Last year Sunny Leone was named the most dangerous celebrity among Indian online users.
These trends indicate that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting naïve online Bollywood fans who are more gullible to such attacks. These criminals capitalize on the public’s fascination with celebrity to lure them to sites laden with malware that enables them to steal passwords and personal information.
The highest instances of malware were reported in sites that used celebrity name couple with key words such as wall paper, video, nude pictures.
By including the names of popular celebrities in a website’s search tags, cyber criminals are able to direct more visitors to malicious sites where they may unwittingly sign up for spam or harmful spyware ending up with a malware ridden devices, said Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, vice-president of Engineering- Consumer and Mobile, Business Group, McAfee India Centre.
The study uses McAfee SiteAdvisor site ratings, which indicate which sites are risky to search when attached to celebrity names on the Web and calculate an overall risk percentage.
Other dangerous celebrities included in the top ten list are Shah rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Farhan Akhtar, Sunny Leone and Hrithik Roshan, in the order of their “dangerous popularity.”
While mostly women scored the most dangerous tag previous years, majority of this year’s dangerous personalities is men. Priyanka Chopra (No. 1), Kareena Kapoor (No. 4) and Sunny Leone (No. 9) are the only women to rank in the top 10 Most Dangerous Celebrity list.
Katrina Kaif, Bipasha Basu, Deepika Padukone and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have all dropped out of this year’s list. In 2012 they ranked No. 2, No. 5, No. 7, and No. 9 respectively.
Some of the “catches” that online users need to be beware of include free downloads from suspected sites. Most users often don’t pay attention to whether the content belongs to official websites of the content providers.
Password thefts are increasingly becoming common among online users. Users are not very keen to change passwords often. Lost or stolen mobile phones also contribute to increased instances of security breaches.
