Lily Collins, daughter of 80’s pop-rock artist Phil Collins and star of “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones”, found herself at the top of a list no celebrity would seemingly want to be part of (unless they are just really narcissistic) – the Most Dangerous Cyber Celebrity of 2013.
How does one win this award, you ask? Well, fortunately for everyone, it isn’t because she is the celebrity that causes the most relationship strife when one’s significant other searches through your browser history (private browsing modes, people – use them). Collins happens to be the most dangerous cyber celebrity because searching for her name on the internet will bring one to a website filled with spyware, malware, adware (and all those other -wares besides Tupperware) more often than when searching for any other celebrity. In fact, “When you search for pictures and downloads of Lily Collins you have about a 14.5% chance of landing on a page that tested positive for spam, adware, spyware, viruses, or other malware,” according to a recent study finished by McAfee.
Paula Greve, director of web security research at McAfee, stated that “Cybercriminals prey on consumers’ addiction to breaking news and leverage this behavior to lead them to unsafe sites that can severely infect their computers and devices and steal personal data.” What Greve left-out in that statement, though, is that cybercriminals also prey on consumers’ addiction to porn; According the the press release from McAfee, when one couples a celebrity’s name with “nude pictures” or “free app download”, it resulted in the highest occurrences of malware-ridden websites. (Cybercriminals also seem to be preying on America’s love of superheros as well.)
Women dominated the top-10 list of the most dangerous celebrities, with Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” being the only male to crack the top 10:
1) Lilly Collins
2) Avril Lavigne
3) Sandra Bullock
4) Kathy Griffin
5) Zoe Saldana
6) Katy Perry
7) Britney Spears
8) Jon Hamm
9) Adriana Lima
10) Emma Roberts
Last year’s front-runner, Emma Watson, dropped out of the top 10 completely. The rest of the top 20 most dangerous celebrities was dominated by musicians – one would assume due to the high amount of music pirating.
One related study that would be of interest would be “Why in the world is McAfee still relevant?” (besides for these videos, of course). Seriously – who still uses that bloatware, and more importantly – why?
Image via Twitter
