Typosquatters have covered almost 80% of the typos of big traffic websites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple
What is Typosquatting ?
Typosquatting is the practice of registering a domain name that’s slightly different from that of a heavily trafficked site in the hope of catching some accidental traffic
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 results showed that for popular services, virtually every example has been registered as an active site. For Apple, 86 per cent of typosquatting variants had been taken, and Google (83 per cent) and Facebook (81 per cent) weren’t far behind.
The bad news was that 2.7% of the URLs fell into the ‘cybercrime’ category (which includes hacking, phishing, online fraud and spamming), another 2.4% were adult or dating sites, and 15% fell into the ‘ads and popups’ classification.
Particularly nasty were the bait-and-switch operations. Sophos found one particular company has 22% of the one-character-away-from-apple.com sites, redirecting them to an “Apple-like page” offering iTunes 10 for download. But clicking the download button takes you to mp3helpdesk site which offers “unlimited downloads for just 0.99 a month”.
