Typing Pitt's name in a search engine produces a one in five chance of hitting a malware site, according to McAfee. Other top search names used as lures include Angelina Jolie, Beyonce, Maria Carey, Jessica Alba, and George Clooney.

Each month, Internet users make more than 550 million clicks to risky Web sites, according to McAfee.

This is good news for criminals using "drive-by downloads" to spread malware, according to F-Secure, a security company. But it is not good news for Internet users typing in innocuous words such "knitting mittens," warns F-Secure.

A Growing Trend

Malware continues to be a problem, warn security experts. Last year, Google's malware team spent a year identifying Web pages that infect vulnerable hosts. What it found is alarming. Of the billions of URLs investigated, the team found more than three million unique URLs on more than 180,000 sites that automatically installed malware.

Google also looked at seven million URLs and mapped them to Open Directory Project or DMOZ categories and found that each was infected.

In 2007 McAfee detected 327 new sites per calendar day and 527 per business day. And the number is growing. Nearly 25,500 detections were added in 2007 compared to 2005 and 2006 combined, according to Jeff Green, McAfee's senior vice president of Avert Labs.

"Scary numbers any way you break them down," Green said in a McAfee blog. "One could almost say malware creation has reached epidemic proportions. We are seeing more malware than ever before, even though the lifespan of malware is decreasing."

Protecting Your Computer

Malware with criminal intent tends to last for a short time, according to Green, only five to seven hours. And most of it is static and obfuscated or intentionally made difficult to read, he said.

If searching for your favorite stars' photos is a must, Google has some advice on computer hygiene. Users should run automatic updates for their operating systems and third-party applications and should install antivirus applications as well, according to Google.

This month, McAfee released its own fix for malware, launching malware-signature software updates and offering users McAfee SiteAdvisor, a free tool that adds yellow, green and red ratings to Web sites, ranking the risk.

Criminals are now shifting from SMTP to HTTP as a way to steal information from Internet users, according to F-Secure, and unless you have a fully patched browser, plug-ins and operating system, you are vulnerable.

Criminals Optimize

"What we are seeing is {malware} is indeed on the rise and has really picked up in the last two years," said Jose Nazario, senior security analyst with Arbor Networks. "It's in the millions, millions and millions of pages in the past year, and that is because of the ease to this."

Criminals are using the same technology used in search-engine optimization , according to Nazario, to lure people using search engines.

To become less vulnerable to these criminals, Nazario says, keep up to date with patches, accept your Windows Automatic Update, and use antivirus software. Or get browser plug-ins such as Haute Secure that tell you which links are okay and which are bad. Search-engine companies are also helping by warning users of risky links, he said.