Stay Tuned
Reviews, previews and much more on "The Real Housewives," "How I Met Your Mother," "NCIS" and many more of your favorite shows. This is the place to talk about all of the things that make us "Stay Tuned"…

Friday, August 10, 2007

VERY Important Information for Parents of "Hannah Montana" Fans

If you needed further evidence of the sick individuals in today’s world, here it is…

EW.com’s “Popwatch” reported this morning that computer scammers are using the popularity of “Hannah Montana” to infect computers.

According to the report, the virus and spyware experts at McAfee researched the pop-culture search-engine queries whose results were most likely to lead users to the most infectious pages. The most dangerous search among currently popular songs is for “Life’s What You Make It,” by Hannah Montana. Kids (or adults) looking for downloadable music, photos or ringtones with that search phrase are most likely to “wind up infecting their PCs with redirects to porn sites or data-stealing spyware that enables identity theft.”

McAfee research analyst Shane Keats told “Popwatch” that scammers closely follow pop culture to target kids and other inexperienced Web surfers. “When they first get to an offer for a Hannah Montana screensaver, they just click yes. Three or four clicks later, they’ve got a single image of Hannah Montana that may or may not be legal, and they’re also going to give themselves porno pop-up ads.”

Keats suggests three tips for protecting your computer from these “pop-culture parasites”:

1) Stick with the official sites (In this case, www.disney.com or www.mileycyrus.com.) Outside of the official sites, any free offer that sounds too good to be true probably is.
2) With search results, the engine-generated links tend to be safer than the sponsored links placed by advertisers.
3) Get some good security software.

You can read the entire post, which includes some other dangerous searches at http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2007/08/hannah-montana-.html...