Haifa Wehbe most dangerous Arabic celebrity online

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Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe is the most dangerous Arabic celebrity in cyberspace, according to research from McAfee. The security company found that Wehbe was the Arabic celebrity whose name was used most often to draw web surfers to websites with unsafe and malicious content.

Singer Wael Kfoury was the second most commonly used celebrity name for unsafe sites in the Middle East, with Paris Hilton ranking as number one worldwide.

Many websites that contain dangerous content such as spyware, adware or spam use the names of celebrities to attract unsuspecting users who are searching the web for celebrity news or gossip. By including the names of popular celebrities in the site's search tags, cyber criminals are able to direct more visitors to malicious sites where they may unwittingly sign up for spam, give away personal details or download harmful content.

McAfee offers its SiteAdvisor software, available as a free download, as means to warn users about the dangers of sites as they surf. The company monitors and catalogues the content of millions of websites, and flags up a warning if the site has been found to contain unsafe content.

Patrick Hayati, regional director of McAfee said: "We have found all types of security threat linked to sites that use celebrity names - it is one of the easiest ways to get traffic to a site. McAfee SiteAdvisor is constantly monitoring tens of millions of sites to assess how safe they are to browse."

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