Security conscious techies now have some additional evidence to illustrate the inherent risks posed from surfing the Internet unprotected.

According to this article at ARSTechnica, one in twenty-five search results across major search engines result in sites affiliated with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and junk e-mail.

The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent).

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