Chris Gayle: "India's most dangerous cricketer"

Chris Gayle tops the charts of “India’s most dangerous cricketer” in cyberspace.

The West Indian has got himself the title as a result of cyber criminals using his name to entice netizens to malevolent sites, as the anti-virus software McAfee claims.

Gayle is followed by fellow cricketers Brett Lee and Sreesanth.

Gayle’s popularity reached its zenith following his whirlwind century against Pune Warriors India, where he hit the fastest century in T20 history.

The risk quotient was determined by examining malicious search results. According to this study, Gayle had 32 search results against his name, followed by Lee with 31 and Sreesanth with 30!

Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, the Vice President of Engineering McAfee India, said, “Cyber criminals constantly leverage famous personalities and very cleverly time their attacks to coincide with popular events in luring people to websites with malicious software. In the context of the on-going cricketing leagues, cyber crooks are leveraging famous cricketers for their nefarious gains.

“In that moment of weakness, they are lured into clicking malicious links that put them at considerable risk.”

Yuvraj, Pietersen, Pollard, Kohli, Miller, Mitchell Johnson, Steyn and Tendulkar are also a part of the list with a considerable amount of risky searches against their names!

Krishnapur says that it is a new trend among cyber criminals to use the names of popular personalities to lure away people to virus-prone links. He explains that the names of these cricketers are jointly used with links like ‘free downloads’, ‘wallpapers’, etc, which place netizens at enormous amount of risk of running into spammed sites. ‘Free downloads’ are most likely to be the ones with viruses among other search terms.