Risky Business: Surfing with the Sharks
August 27th 2009 17:52
We are all of us aggregators of information. There are some safe places to go fact finding and some not so safe places. While I am not altogether sure what facts you'd be finding on a porn site, it is a safe bet that there is no safe surfing there. The problem with porn sites is that most of us most of the time should not be there either because we are at work or because our significant other does not care for the behavior.
So the rest of the internet is safe--right? Well no. One of the surprising places to run into bad sites is on your friendly neighborhood Google search. I'm not even talking about that time you went searching photos of that teacher from a Midwestern town who got fired for posting naughty photos on her blog. No I mean you are minding your own time wasting business, tweeting away on twitter when you notice that some obscure term you've never heard of is trending.
So you go to Google it and the next thing you know you get a series of popup boxes that indicate your system maybe be infected and they even have one popup that seems to be doing a scan of your system. Okay so you know that whole deal is a scam that would actually infect your system with malware if you clicked on it, but it does mean not even a Google search is entirely safe.
Another place where you may encounter unexpected bad news is when you are looking at trending topics on Alexa. About ten or so of the topics are always completely bogus. How they get to top of the Alexa URL stack is a anyone's guess. My money is on the idea that they have a million or so zombie computer's that electronically click on to their spam site a couple of times each to get to the top Alexa's most viewed URLs. If you make the mistake of clicking on one of these spam sites you will quickly notice they are asking for money for a completely bogus product and you will try to close the window. And then you get deja vu all over again. That nasty JavaScript code that opens up other pages when your try to leave.
So are there safe aggregators of information? I don't suppose anything is entirely safe anymore but there are sites that haven't directly steered me wrong yet. Digg, Propeller, CNN, FoxNews--any true news site for that matter. These kinds of sites have yet to display a link for me that immediately led to the never ending popup boxes or the shock jock who screams you might be infected!
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