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The Most Dangerous Arabic Online Celebrity- Haifa Wehbe

As per a research by McAfee, the Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe is found to be the most dangerous online celebrity. The security company reveals that Haifa is an Arabic celebrity whose name is used to attract the Internet surfers towards malicious sites and contents.

While Paris Hilton is on the top in the list of popular figures being used for attracting people for installing harmful contents, singer Wael Kfoury holds the second rank. Further, the list continues with pop star Amy Winehouse and football player Cristiano Ronaldo.

McAfee claimed that celebrities are normally used by the cyber-attackers as an allurement for making people click on deadly contents and links. Many such sites, carrying dangerous stuff (spyware, spam, adware etc.), use the names of popular figures to cheat innocent users who search the net for celebrity news and gossip.

McAfee reports that by inculcating the names of popular figures in the tags of the site's search engine, the cyber attackers succeeded in deceiving the users to visit harmful sites, where they can mistakenly log on for spam and end up in leaking their private data.

A Security Analyst at McAfee, Greg Day, said that the prevailing trend with the authors of malware is to adapt things which are famous with the masses, as per the news of itnews.com in the 3rd week of August.

As per Sophos, these types of mails come with attachments known as shocking.zip or amazing.zip. Senior technology consultant of Sophos, Graham Cluley, said that these emails put up the mask of celebrities names and attract the innocent users into opening a file on their Windows computer which will download a rootkit and further harmful content, as per the news of SecurityPark.Net on August 23, 2007.

Cluley continues that, ironically, these social engineering tricks are as old as the silent movies but they still stand out as an effective means of fooling and cheating users by operating code made to allow hackers to enter the user's PC.

Finally, he suggested that the best way to fight back these problems is to have safe computing which does not only mean having an updated anti-virus, firewall, security patches but also having an open mind and eye towards the kind of programs operated on the PC.

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