Surprising though it might sound, the reasons behind it are actually not that complicated.
On the surface, Canadian singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne wouldn’t appear to be the most threatening of famous people on the planet (despite an unmistakable edge in the spelling of one of her hit songs, ‘Sk8er Boi’), but her internet persona, it turns out, is more dangerous than any of her high-profile peers.
Lavigne has come in on top of the 11th annual McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities study, which reveals which celebrities generate the most “dangerous” search results ( for searches that included a celebrity name and search terms likely to yield potentially malicious websites in the results) and create the biggest risk for users browsing the web.
The entire top ten, including Lavigne, are all famous for their exploits in the music industry, which, according to McAfee, is explained by the fact that content searches for new music lead many into “uncertain areas of the internet”.
The dangers of searching for “free mp3”, for example, accounted for approximately 40% of the risky websites generated by searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo!, according to McAfee, with “free torrent” and “free mp4” accounting for 36% and 24% of risky websites respectively.
Lavigne’s position at the top of the list might come as a surprise considering that she hasn’t released an album since 2013, but her announcement last year that she was due to release an album in 2017 has sparked an increase in interest.
As well as that, a bizarre and thankfully false conspiracy theory that Lavigne had died and been replaced by an impostor didn’t exactly help matters in terms of dangerous search results.
Bruno Mars, Carly Rae Jepsen, Celine Dion, Justin Bieber and Beyonce were amongst other famous musicians to feature on the list; check out the top ten below.
McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities
- Avril Lavigne
- Bruno Mars
- Carly Rae Jepsen
- Zayn Malik
- Celine Dion
- Calvin Harris
- Justin Bieber
- Diddy
- Katy Perry
- Beyonce
