She may be one of the funniest comics on the circuit at the moment, but it's no laughing matter if you Google Amy Schumer at the moment. She's just been singled out by Intel and McAfee as the celebrity whose related search results are most likely to land you with a nasty dose of malware.
As Intel points out, nefarious hackers and web ne'er do-wells love to tap into the public's thirst for salacious celebrity gossip, making honey-trap sites intended to lure in naive web surfers before hitting them with viruses and phishing scams.
Schumer was joined in the top ten most-dangerous celebrity search targets by Justin Bieber, Carson Daly, Will Smith, Rhianna, Miley Cyrus, Chris Hardwick, Danieth Tosh, Selena Gomez and Kesha.
Safe surfing
"With [a] craving for real-time information, many [web users] search and click without considering potential security risks," said Gary Davis, chief consumer security evangelist at Intel Security.
"Cybercriminals know this and take advantage of this behavior by attempting to lead them to unsafe sites loaded with malware. As a result, consumers need to understand what precautions to take to enable safe online experiences."
To give you a sense of the scale of the threat, a search for "Amy Schumer Torrent" was found to have a 33% chance of returning a malicious website, according to the security experts.
The advice remains simple - think before you click, stick to only trusted websites, use two-factor authentication on your devices if possible, and remember that the peer-to-peer nature of torrents leaves the file format open to abuse.
- Stay safe online with the best antivirus
