Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are more likely to give you a virus than a nude Paris Hilton, a new study finds.
The State of Search Engine Safety report, released Monday by McAfee's SiteAdvisor group, evaluates the risks associated with approximately 2,300 of the most popular search terms based on the sites they return.
According to the study, conducting an online search for Suri's parents returns a slightly higher percentage of sites bundled with spyware and other malicious code than a search for the hotel heiress in her birthday suit.
Determined to be far more hazardous than searching for Cruise, Holmes or Hilton was scanning the World Wide Web for "Britney Spears nude," a search term that ranked above "free porn" in terms of the risky results it returned.
Less predictably, searching for a (presumably clothed) Lil' Wayne proved sketchier than hunting down either a nude Pamela Anderson or a nude Carmen Electra, while a search for Nicole Richie was determined to be more dangerous than the term "eating spiders while asleep"
Mark Maxwell, a senior product manager for SiteAdvisor, said the number of risky sites turned up by a search for a given star is not always a factor of their public profile.
"It's not necessarily an attribute of the celebrities themselves," Maxwell told E! Online.
He pointed out that typing "Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston" into a search engine returned a significantly higher percentage of undesirable results than a search for the actor and his current flame, Angelina Jolie.
"Are Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston truly riskier than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as people? No," Maxwell said.
He explained that legitimate Websites tend to "age out" their coverage of less relevant topics, meaning that Web surfers looking for information on Pitt and Aniston are more likely to stumble upon sites run by less scrupulous operators, while those searching for Pitt and Jolie have more above-board sites from which to choose.
"Obviously, what they're trying to catch is people who are a little off their guard," Maxwell said.
He advised Internet users to make "educated and informed" decisions online in order to avoid having their personal information fall into the wrong hands.
In other words: don't go clicking on any old site that promises pictures of Jessica Simpson in the buff.
"It's like the old adage your grandmother told you: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is," Maxwell said.