It wasn’t surprising that Paris Hilton would give you viruses, we expected that, but now Brad Pitt is more apt to crash your hard drive.  McAfee has released a list of names entered into a search engine that are most likely to lead you to malware-hosted sites.  While the main culprit was Hilton last year, she doesn’t even make the top ten this year.  Pitt, however, will get you a one in five chance of internet infestation.

The top ten bad-news names from one to ten are Pitt, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Heidi Montag, Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney and, surprise, Angelina Jolie. 

If you’ve never heard of some of these people then it’s a fair bet that you are not the intended target of a technique that has been for some years one of the commonest ways to infect a PC. But still it persists, driven by an apparently insatiable appetite among some Internet users for computer screensavers, wallpaper, ring tones and star pictures, at whatever risk to themselves.

“Cybercriminals employ numerous methods, yet one of the simplest but most effective way is to trick consumers into infecting themselves by capitalizing on Americans’ interest in celebrity gossip,” commented McAfee’s Jeff Green. “Tapping into current events, pop culture or commonly browsed sites is an easy way to achieve this.”

[InfoWorld.com]

While it goes without saying that it’s always a wise move to make sure you’re protected, McAfee isn’t completely altruistic in letting us in on this valuable little morsel of information.  Besides being the first name in malware protection you’ll think of after reading their own study, McAfee has a SiteAdvisor tool for search engines to weed out these fake sites and Yahoo! has recently started using it.  It makes them a pretty penny and it makes us all a little more aware, so I’ll give it it’s due.

Speaking of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, so you don’t have to go searching, once again reps of the couple have had to make a statement refuting rumors they have split.  Sparked by the nonexistence of photos of the happily unmarried parents of six since their twins were born two months ago, reports reached the couple’s representatives via the internet that Brangelina were no longer.  Hard-hitting television news magazine Entertainment Tonight got the real scoop.

Despite the rumors swirling around the Internet that power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have split, ET gets to the bottom of the story.

Angelina’s rep tells ET the reports are “absolutely not true.”

[Entertainment Tonight via MSN Entertainment]

To put an exclamation point on the denial of trouble in paradise, Us Magazine says a source tells them that the whole family had a 10am breakfast together outside the French chateau they’re living in on Thursday morning.  You can’t argue with breakfast, ladies and gentlemen.

Brad Pitt is shown at the Burn After Reading premiere on 8/27/08. Credit: Solarpix / PR Photos