Chris Gayle ‘most dangerous cricketer’ in Indian cyberspace: McAfee study

The Jamaican cricketer and former captain of West Indies team, Chris Gayle, is the 'most dangerous cricketer' to search on the web.

This is because cyber criminals often use names of celebrities to lure people to malicious sites that are designed to steal passwords and personal information.

Fans using strings such as 'name of cricketer' combined with words like 'free downloads', 'hot pictures', 'wallpapers', and 'videos' are at risk of running themselves into malicious sites.

Gayle, who ranks number one with a total of 32 infected search results, is followed by Brett Lee with 31 infected search results to his credit.

Indian cricketer Sreesanth, who is embroiled in the spot-fixing controversy, ranks third with 30 infected search results, followed immediately by Yuvraj Singh (29), according to a study by security technology company McAfee - 'India's Most Dangerous Cricketer' - researched this season's top celebrities of the cricketing world on their risk quotient in the Indian cyberspace.

David Miller ranks fifth (28), followed by South African bowler Dale Steyn (27). The others in the list are Kevin Pietersen and Kieron Pollard (26 each), Mitchell Johnson and Rohit Sharma (25 each) and Virat Kohli (24). Sachin Tendulkar ranks at the bottom of the list at 10th position.

According to Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, vice-president of engineering, Mcafee India Centre: ''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 ongoing cricketing leagues, cyber crooks are leveraging famous cricketers for their nefarious gains.''

"During such events, eager cricket crazy fans are highly-motivated to search for photos, videos, score and stories of their favourite cricketers online and in that moment of weakness they are lured into clicking malicious links that puts them at considerable risk,'' he added.