A recent study shows that GTA 5 is one of the most malware ridden searches

Surfshark VPN has recently conducted an interesting study about the most malware-ridden searches, and GTA 5 ranks highly in it. They essentially curated some lists of popular teams, put them in Google along with some other terms, and then ran them through a malware detecter.

All percentages in this study come from those URLs with "Medium Risk" or higher. The categories in their study were:

Male Actors
Female Actors
Movies
TV Shows
Anime
Books
Games
Musicians
Songs

GTA 5 is, unsurprisingly, one of the top-ranked ones in the Games category.

GTA 5 is one of the most malware-ridden searches, according to a study by Surfshark

The top ten might surprise you (Image via Surfshark)

GTA 5 is one of the most popular video games of all time, having already sold over 160,000,000 units worldwide. It is only behind Minecraft in this metric, so it's not surprising that such a beloved title would be associated with so much malware. Interestingly, Minecraft is not in the top ten in this study.

These are the top ten most malware ridden searches, according to Surfshark's study:

Mortal Kombat 11 (46.5%)
Fall Guys (46.4%)
GTA 5 (43.5%)
God of War (41.8%)
Escape From Tarkov (41.8%)
NBA 2K22 (41.7%)
Titanfall 2 (41.4%)
PUBG (40.8%)
Forza Horizon 5 (40.0%)
Counter Strike: GO (39.8%)

This game's popularity has been consistent since 2013 (Image via Rockstar Games)

It can be surprising to see it rank lower than a game like Fall Guys, which has lost a substantial amount of popularity since its debut. Nonetheless, it's not surprising that GTA 5 ranks this high, especially since "free downloads" and "torrents" tend to trend with it.

According to Surfshark, only 33.9% of all search results for the 50 most popular video games have malware. This would make it one of the smallest percentages out of all these categories. Nonetheless, gamers should do their best to avoid obvious URLs that will infect their computers with malware.

Be careful what you download (Image via Rockstar Games, Android)

Generally, if it sounds too good to be true (like a free GTA 5 APK file), then that's a cause for concern. Surfshark also mentions in the general prelude prior to their infographic that:

"The best-selling Grand Theft Auto V ranks as the third most dangerous video game to search for, with 43.5% of URL results containing potential malware. In 2015, several popular GTA V mods were found to contain malware that logged computer activity and sent and received data across the web."

Mods are commonly one of the most searched things associated with the game, and the act of having to download them makes them ripe for containing more than just the mods themselves. They're often hard to detect for the average gamer, especially if they come bundled with a popular mod.

The relevant infographic from the study (Image via Surfshark)

Surfshark's study has all sorts of other interesting information that gamers might wish to check out. After all, video games were only one small part of it. Curious ones can find out more information by going to the study directly, with a link provided down below: