SANGEETA YADAV tells you how following celebs or high ticket events on the Internet can make you bankrupt
Ever thought the name and fame of your favourite celebrity may turn out to be a big risk to you and your confidential information on the webIJ A recent study done by Intel Security’s Most Sensational Celebrity reveals that if you are following Bollywood stars like Priyanka Chopra or TV wonders like Kapil Sharma, you might just lose a lot.
According to the study, Chopra’s with the highest risk factor at 15.56 per cent, closely followed by Shraddha Kapoor at 12.92 per cent and Kapil Sharma (12.22 per cent) are the top three riskiest personalities on the web this year.
The list goes on with Jacqueline Fernandez with 11.94 percentage, Kangana Ranaut with 11.11 per cent, Hrithik Roshan with 10.97 per cent, Deepika Padukone with 10.69 per cent, Emran Hashmi with 10.69 per cent, Sunny leone with 10.69 per cent, Alia Bhatt with 10.42 per cent, Aamir Khan with 10.28 per cent and Kareena Kapoor with a 10.14 per cent risk quotient.
“Cyber criminals take advantage of events like a cricket tournament and known people to malign consumers who search for their pictures, music, latest news and free items on the web. There are a bunch of risky websites that unleash malware into your computer leading to loss of data and other serious issues. Our study uses celebrities as an example of how cyber criminals can socially engineer and victimise vulnerable net surfers,” Venkat Krishnapur, head of Intel Security Group, India Engineering Centre, tells you.
His research reveals that almost 11.47 per cent of all links generated while evaluating the top 10 celebrity names (coupled with search terms torrent, HD download, and free MP4) led to malware ridden or suspicious sites. With such big names trending online, the chances of getting cheated of personal information stored in the computer gets manifold. The consumers, especially fans of the celebrities, get trapped and lose valuable data.
“Sky is the limit in terms of what cyber criminals can do — they can steal content, monitor what you are doing and who you are talking to. They could be sitting there and monitoring Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like credit card information, social security and so on,” Krishnapur says.
Though these celebrities figure as most risky personalities online, it doesn’t affect their reputation. “We are not saying that the actors are the ones calling the risk. This report lists the most risky personality on the web search but we do not mean to affect their reputation. Neither we collaborate with any celebrity or approach them with this report. It’s meant to highlight and educate people how to protect them from malicious websites and browser exploits,” Krishnapur explains.
The research led by Intel Security and McAfee WebAdvisor, has been done through patented technology Site Advisor which determined the risk levels through red, yellow and green colour indicators that appear with the website.
“We prepare a list of search terms like popular celebrity, events like cricket matches, awards, celebrity break-ups, new launches etc and common key words like free mp3 download or wallpaper and analyse the list of errant websites that comes up. Through this technology which works on with Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Bing and Firefox and is free to download, we web crawl millions of websites and analyse their safety. That’s how we identify the top 10 sensational celebrity whose online presence has laddered with malware,” Krishnapur says.
Apart from searching online using McAfee WebAdvisor software, people should also follow important preventive measures like not clicking on third party links and should download videos only from well known legitimate sites. One should be careful while searching for videos or files through torrent sites to download content.
“People should access content directly from official websites of their favourite celebrities and their videos and music from reliable websites. If you receive a message, text or email or visit a third-party website that asks for your information — including your credit card, email, home address, Facebook login — to grant access to an exclusive story, don’t give it out. Such requests are a common tactic for phishing that could lead to identity theft,” Krishnapur says.