There are many late nights when I sit in the Bach Seat after a long day of coordinating shared technical services and need some silliness. Tonight Show funny-guy Jay Leno was my late-night source of silliness until BitDefender told me he is the Most Dangerous Celebrity in Cyberspace.
According to an analysis of 25 million spam messages by the Bucharest, Romania-based anti-malware firm, comedian and TV host Jay Leno is the most dangerous Hollywood celebrity in cyberspace. BitDefender found Mr. Leno mentioned in the subject line of 38,000 spam messages most of which focused around medicine and the purchasing of pills but come with enticing subjects such as ‘Jay Leno found taking drugs.’
“Cybercriminals follow the latest trends just as consumers do and they use these and the names of popular celebrities in their campaigns to lure people to websites that are full of malicious software (malware),” said Catalin Cosoi, Head of the BitDefender Online Threats Lab.
Af
ter Mr. Leno, the article at InfosSec Island says that cybercriminals next most often used Madonna and Cameron Diaz to spread spam. (I noted Cameron Diaz’s reign as the McAfee “Most Dangerous Celebrity on the Web” here). The rest of the top 10 personalities used by spammers include:
- Barack Obama
- Rockers AC/DC
- Stephen King
- George Lucas
- Kenny Chesney
- Howard Stern and
- 50 Cent.
Other notables on the list are:
Notable for their absence from the list are:
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The use of celebrities to promote malware and spam is deeply rooted in social networking and Web 2.0. In 2009, Barracuda Networks identified a ‘Twitter crimewave’ on Twitter after popular celebrities joined the service to tweet to fans. Criminals followed the celebrities to the new service sensing a new population of easy-to-fool users, using a range of techniques including impersonation and simple link spamming to draw people to malware-infested websites. Facebook still has a major problem with celebrity abuse.
This may seem trivial because most firms have set up gateways to filter these spam-mails from hapless users’ inboxes. However, there are enough users that ignore the warnings and open spam-mails to make spamming on a vast scale worthwhile to the spammers.
Related articles
- Video: Jay Leno turns a wheel in the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport (autoblog.com)
- Jay Leno gets driving lesson in an MP4-12C (topgear.com)
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.