Sorry Dirty Grandpa fans: "Robert De Niro" is the pop culture search term most likely to give you a virus
De Niro just edged out Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, and Kate Winslet for the honor
It’s a cruel world out there for the cineastes who want to go online and feel safe and secure while thoughtfully studying Dirty Grandpa-centered film criticism. As it turns out, there is no pop culture search term more likely to result in a malware infection than the name of that cinema classic’s star, Robert De Niro.
A study published by digital security company Surfshark looked into the pop culture search terms that most often lead to malware-infected sites. The results are based on Surfshark “curating seed lists of the most popular search terms across a variety of pop culture categories,” searching for them on Google with added qualifiers like “torrent,” “download,” “stream,” or “MP3,” and then analyzing which links contained malware.
While De Niro was the top overall term (with 54.1% of URLs containing potential malware), actors like Jake Gyllenhaal (53.6%), Anthony Hopkins (52.6%), Kate Winslet (52.6%), and Margot Robbie (52%) were just behind him in the results.