Free, Screensavers, 2009 Saturn, Lyrics

Can you just look at keywords and see which ones are safe? Aren’t they all safe? No. And you can’t just look at a search term to decide if its safe any more than you can look at a book’s cover to see if the book will be any good  – a little reading is on order. A ZDNet article two days ago about dangerous keywords reminded me about a painful lesson.

Unfortunately all search terms are not created equal… and Cybercriminals know it. The bad guys (scammers, hackers and the like) use SEO (coding your website so search engines rank it well) and SEM (paying to have search engines list your site). Unfortunately not only the good guys use SEO & SEM to get people to their websites, but so do the bad guys. Several of years back I was googling for a new screensaver or wallpaper or something and I ended up on one of those websites that tricked me into downloading a virus or malware or something that was not good – its been a while and my virus scanner was up-to-date and I got lucky and cleaned my machine of the downloaded infection.

Although McAfee touts McAfee SiteAdvisor as a way to minimize your risk (there are free and paid versions) education can go a long way. Nothing will ever make you 100% safe on the Internet, but these tips should help a lot

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