Thursday, 17 May 2012
Typosquatting gains ground
Typosquatting gains ground
By SecurityAsia Editors | Dec 28, 2011
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PrintSophos is cautioning computer users to be careful how they type, following the results of a Sophos study into the scale of 'typosquatting'.
Typosquatters register misspellings of popular websites in the hope of generating traffic from users making mistakes entering web URLs.
Sophos looked at typosquatting targeting its own website and those of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple. The study looked for registered websites for every single one letter typo of the company name: one letter omitted (eg Sopos), one letter mistyped (eg Sphos), or one letter added (Ssophos).
The study revealed that there is a significant typosquatting ecosystem around high-profile, often-typed domain names. A huge 86% of the possible one letter misspellings of the Apple homepage led to typosquatting sites.
The highest proportion of the squatting sites - 15% - led to advertising sites. Cybercriminals will register misspelled sites to make advertising revenue every time someone mistypes the name of a popular site. 12% were found to be IT & hosting pages - suggesting that they have been registered with the intention of being held onto and sold at a profit. Of the 14,495 misspelled URLs looked at in the study, 738 (5.1%) were categorized by Sophos as cybercrime or adult
"It's so easy to mistype a URL, and it's inevitable that from time to time you will end up on an unintended website. In the worst cases, careless typing can lead you to a criminal website designed to steal your identity or phish your credentials," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos. "A good idea is to bookmark your favourite websites rather than rely upon your fingers working correctly."
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I was talking with Ryan
I was talking with Ryan Deiss about this and advertising can sometimes be done in a wrong way. On other hand, people have to be careful about what websites they access online. Anyways, in the future, I don't think that such domains will be very profitable. People can use the auto-complete function that browsers offer.