Typosquatting: Scam to Profit from Mistyped Domain Names

Earlier this week, Sophos security expert James Lyne appeared on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt to discuss the dangers of typosquatting. Computer security reporter Tom Costello interviewed James on why this perennial hacker trick has continued to prevail, while James explains and demonstrates how it works. Naked Security investigates the scale and risk of typosquatting even further after a reader recently put herself in harm’s way by mistyping a popular URL. The typosquatting industry is made up of people who register mis-spellings of popular domains in the hope that they will be able to profit from the traffic from these unintentional typing mistakes. Naked Security created an experiment where they chose six popular domains to see what sort of risk ‘fat-fingers’ can pose. Typos were limited to one alphabetic character in the company name, whether that be one letter omitted, one letter mistyped, or one letter added. All of the one character mistakes produced more than one thousand unique site names, like facemook.com instead of facebook.com. Typosquat percentages for companies like Facebook, Google, or even Sophos, among the others in the experiment, were high ranging in the 60’s through the 80’s. Results of the experiment show that while typosquat sites were not overrun with malware, they still aren’t necessarily harmless. Some URL’s downloaded when visiting a typosquat fell into a loose category of cybercrime, while many others were made up of advertising sites and popups. To learn more about the typosquatting ecosystem, and the takeaways from this experiment, visit here.