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MFY most dangerous team on the Internet

RealityChuck Jul 07 2006 12:06 PM

[url]http://www.siteadvisor.com/surveys/baseball_july2006.html[/url] ]All-Star Game of Spyware MLB's greatest players and teams ranked by the danger of their screensaver searches Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, and Albert Pujols are household names for any baseball fanatic. They also lead the pack of the most hazardous players in McAfee SiteAdvisor's survey of the most risky baseball screensaver searches. We tested each of Major League Baseball's 1,224 players by passing their names through Google and adding the word 'screensaver.' We compared the results with our own database of over 4.5 million site ratings for Web safety. Searching for screensavers for Bonds, Jeter or Pujols and clicking on one of the results will give a PC a .600 Earned Risk Average (ERA) – in other words, a 60% chance of landing at a risky site. Josh Fogg of the Colorado Rockies is the only player to score higher, with 75% of his results tainted by sketchy behavior and software. Nearly three hundred players scored 30% or worse. The average ERA for the entire league was 18%. This activity doesn't surprise us. We frequently observe spammers and spyware distributors targeting fun and games. Our recent look at the safety of screensaver searches for World Cup soccer players produced a comparable outcome. The average Web consumer, however, is not getting the message. According to Yahoo's keyword selector tool Yahoo! had roughly 3.5 million searches in May for "screensaver," "wallpaper" and related search terms. Given that Yahoo accounts for 23% of all searches, an estimated 15.1 million total searches for these desktop visual enhancements are conducted each month. We hope this survey sends a message: baseball fans beware. Your computer can easily be demoted to the minor leagues of operability if you're not careful where you click. Exploiting Baseball's Most Famous Rivalry After scoring each player search for its percentage of red and yellow results, we averaged each team roster and then ranked the teams. SiteAdvisor rates sites red and yellow for a variety of security threats and annoyances including spyware, viruses, pop-ups, e-mail practices like spam, scams and browser exploits. Teams with higher numbers have, on average, more hazardous player searches. Clubs with lower numbers will usually have less harmful crews. Of MLB's thirty teams, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox duke it out for the top dishonor. The Pittsburgh Pirates are the safest. Rank Team Risky Results 1 New York Yankees 24.0% 2 Boston Red Sox 23.2% 3 Houston Astros 23.1% 4 St. Louis Cardinals 22.7% 5 Chicago White Sox 20.2% 6 Milwaukee Brewers 19.2% 7 Minnesota Twins 18.2% Toronto Blue Jays 18.2% 8 Cleveland Indians 18.1% Washington Nationals 18.1% 9 Philadelphia Phillies 18.0% 10 Texas Rangers 17.9% 11 Oakland Athletics 17.6% 12 Arizona Diamondbacks 17.5% 13 Baltimore Orioles 17.3% 14 Colorado Rockies 17.1% 15 Chicago Cubs 17.0% Cincinnati Reds 17.0% Kansas City Royals 17.0% 16 Los Angeles Angels 16.9% 17 San Diego Padres 16.2% 18 Los Angeles Dodgers 15.7% New York Mets 15.7% 19 Detroit Tigers 14.9% 20 Seattle Mariners 14.8% 21 San Francisco Giants 14.2% 22 Atlanta Braves 13.7% 23 Tampa Bay Devil Rays 13.6% 24 Florida Marlins 13.5% 25 Pittsburgh Pirates 11.6%

Edgy DC Jul 07 2006 12:36 PM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Jul 07 2006 12:50 PM

You figure looking for a Randy Johnson screensaver is always a risk. I used to have a Rey Ordóñez screensaver. That's right. I said it. (On edit: Elias reports that he savied 8.2 screens per 27 outs.)

OlerudOwned Jul 07 2006 12:40 PM

Why did I always have a hunch that Josh Fogg was pure evil?

seawolf17 Jul 07 2006 12:44 PM

The Seattle Mariners: =olive]We May Not Be Good, But We're The 20th Least Scary Team In Baseball

PatchyFogg Jul 07 2006 01:42 PM

OlerudOwned wrote: Why did I always have a hunch that Josh Fogg was pure evil? He's been giving us Fogg's a bad name for years.

TheOldMole Jul 07 2006 03:11 PM

How does this work?

RealityChuck Jul 07 2006 03:47 PM

It's explained in the article: the searched for screensavers with the various names and counted how many of the ones that showed up were really spyware delivery systems.