Dubious Honors: Top 25 Names in Spam Titles, 2009

McAfee Labs on Monday unveiled its rankings of the Top 25 men and women listed in the subject lines of spam e-mails in 2009 with President Obama coming in atop the less-than-desirable list.

Spammers and phishers have and always will use celebrities and breaking news events to promulgate their annoying and increasingly destructive malware.

President Obama checked in as the most common spam subject last year, beating out the likes of Michael Jackson (No. 2 among men), former President George W. Bush (No. 3), actor Brad Pitt (No. 4) and musician Eminem (No. 5).

Rounding out McAfee’s (NYSE: MFE) Top 10 among men in spam subject lines were Warren Buffett (No. 6), Chuck Norris (No. 7), Don Juan (No. 8), Elton John (No. 9) and Sacha Baron Cohen (No. 10).

Others worth noting were Pope Benedict XVI (No. 11), Elvis Presley (No. 12), Mike Tyson (No. 16) and American Idol judge Simon Cowell barely made the cut at No. 25.

Among women in subject lines, spammers, fishers and would-be hackers thought Internet users would be most likely to click on a link with actress Angelina Jolie’s name attached to it. In fact, only President Obama was found in more subject lines than Mrs. Brad Pitt, according to McAfee’s January 2010 Spam Report.

“Bottom line, it looks like you have to be President to be a more popular spam target than Angelina,” the report’s authors said. “Sorry, guys.”

Oprah Winfrey checked in at No. 2 followed by Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus.

Read the rest at ServerWatch.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020