Hit "Search" and Don't Forget the Salt

When I reached for the paper today, the Entertainment section fell out of the bundle. The headline of one news item particularly caught my attention:

"Jessica Biel 'most dangerous celeb'"

Huh? I know Jessica Biel is what a lot of guy friends have called "hot" and I myself admit I'd probably climb Mount Everest to have abs like hers but I certainly did not think that her looks could kill.

Well, virtually, that is.

Apparently, according to a study conducted by McAfee, searches on the actress online are more likely to lead to spyware, viruses and other online threats. Last year, the celebrity who could boast of knocking not just women's socks off but also just about anyone's hard drive was Brad Pitt.

This has made me realize how much cybercrime has evolved through the years. When I was in high school, when I was asked what crimes could possibly be committed through the Internet, I could only give two answers: hacking and identity theft. Now it has evolved into so many other things, including the utilization of search engine optimization as illustrated by the Jessica Biel incident.

In search engine optimization, the goal is to get the website as much traffic as possible by making sure that they land among the top hits in a search engine's results page. Such is achieved by editing its content, its HTML codes, embedded images and other codes.

Black Hat SEO is what results to the exposure to malware and other online threats. Unlike its "good" counterpart (called White Hat SEO which complies with the standards set by search engines), Black Hat SEO makes use of underhand tactics to get web traffic and redirect hits to their pages such as keyword stuffing (filling a webpage with keywords either through it meta tags or the content itslf). For instance, they can hide certain keywords within the site itself by making them invisible or positioning them somewhere off screen.

I really miss the days when the Internet was not so popular as it is now, when clicking "search" in Altavista, Ask Jeeves and WebCrawler was not something which should elicit an extra dose of attention and wariness. According to the McAfee study, the most dangerous keywords in general are "free" and "screensaver," indicating that these shady Internet characters do realize that a lot of people online are on the lookout for free stuff. Indeed cyberspace has become the new venue for varying degrees of freedom - whether the hat be black or wite.