![]() Even though you may tolerate adult sites yourself, you don’t want to expose your workplace or your children to them. And 354 of the URLs (2.4%) were adult or dating sites. That means they have an association with hacking, phishing, online fraud or spamming. There is still risk involved.ģ84 of the typosquat URLs (2.7%) fell into the loose category of cybercrime. Regardless of this, typosquats are not to be taken lightly. Surprisingly, out of the many typosquatted URLs, only one of them contained malware. There is clearly a considerable typosquatting ecosystem around high-profile, frequently-typed domain names. Figures for the other brands were significantly higher: Microsoft typosquats were at 61%, Twitter 74%, Facebook 81%, Google 83% and Apple at 86%. Sophos don’t have thousands of users attempting to visit their URL, however, they do have a few squatters (56 out of 333, or 16%) hoping for occasional search traffic or for the chance to sell on a domain name. ![]() He then used Sophos, as a baseline of how many typosquats a regular business domain would expect to have. That produced 2249 unique site names, from “”, through “”, to “”. Paul generated all possible one-character mistakes in the “” form of the six domains. Typos involving numbers or punctuation marks were ignored. To keep things simple, he only looked at typos where one alphabetic character in the company name was different: one letter omitted, one letter mistyped, or one letter added. Things get even more complicated if numerical characters that could pose as letters are included.Ī recent study undertaken by Paul Ducklin (from IT Security firm, Sophos) revealed some interesting results when analysing typosquatting for six popular brand names: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and, his own employer, Sophos. Much like cybersquatting, a company could try protecting itself by buying common misspelt versions of their name, however, this could run into the thousands, if all alphabetical possibilities were considered. Whether it directs you to a malicious or perfectly legitimate site is up to the owner/operator of the typosquatting website. Typosquatting itself can be very difficult to remove, as typosquatters register misspelt versions of popular domains in the hope that they will be able to make money out of traffic from unintentional typing mistakes, or fat-finger errors, made by internet users. Once at the typosquatter’s website, the user may also be tricked into thinking that they are on the real site through the use of copied or similar logos, website layouts or content. An abuse of the Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD): “example.cm” A person leaving out the letter “o” in “.com” in error could arrive at the fake URL’s website. ![]()
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