Social engineering to spread malware generally relies on getting people to click on things they would usually avoid. Hackers know to remain topical, and use popular search terms to get this done; with Comic Con around the corner, the flavour of the month happens to be Superheroes. McAfee Siteadvisor has published a list of the Superheroes who are most likely to also carry malware in the links.
Surprisingly, the most dangerous Superhero to be looking for is Aquaman. Often ridiculed for his lack of land based powers, Aquaman ranks the riskiest link with a 20-percent chance of landing on a malicious website. This was only slightly higher than the second placed Immortal Iron Fist who has a 19.69-percent chance of sending an unsuspecting reader malware.
Interestingly, these particular Superheroes aren’t exactly household names; and one would think that social engineering would at least target more common Supers like Iron Man or Batman. That being said, both Iron Man and Batman also appear on the top ten list; with only a miniscule different in chance of hitting malware.
The Most Toxic Superheroes list is compiled by using McAfee SiteAdvisor that rates websites by risk level that contain the superhero search terms on the most popular search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). SiteAdvisor scans websites and ranks them according to threat level, although people often ignore these warnings and go with whatever looks interesting.
[Source: McAfee]
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