Brittany Murphy Searching Dangers

Sadly, actress Brittany Murphy passed away over the weekend. With her unfortunate passing will come the inevitable web searches that lead Internet users to some potentially unsafe sights. This has been a well established trend throughout 2009. It is a sad reflection that malware authors and scammers will use these events as lures to distribute their warez and site links.

Over the weekend I first started seeing tweets relating to Brittany Murphy and began capturing images and running some searches. Very quickly these lead to the expected results:

The SiteAdvisor warning page on it is pretty clear on its intentions:

Some of the search phrases that are yielding very questionable results are:

Brittany Murphy dies
Brittany Murphy dead
Brittany Murphy husband
Brittany Murphy death hoax
Ashton Kutcher Brittany Murphy
Brittany Murphy 8 mile
Brittany Murphy luanne

Some of these had more than half the results on the first Google search page as flagged yellow or red by our SiteAdvisor technology.

The bad guys have been using celebrity deaths and natural disasters as a successful lure for most of this year. The words “Brittany” and “Murphy” along with related event words are trending very high in Google Trends and Tweetcloud currently. This means the bad guys will be using it as a lure because users are already searching for information on the subject. Make sure you are aware of the trend and stay one step ahead of them! Use SiteAdvisor and search safely!!