Gone are the days when you mistyped a domain and found a friendly version of Google or Yahoo. Today the stakes with mistyped domains are quite high and what is now firmly established as typosquatting is big business—albeit a largely criminal business.
According to a study conducted by online security firm Sophos, more than 80% of mistyped URLS lead to junk websites that either try to phish personal data or infect your computer with malware. The practice of using typosquatting for nefarious means has been around since 2005, and it was in this year that Google fought and won the rights for oogkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com. All three domains were being used by a Russian man to spread malware.Today, software can spit out the entire permutations for a domain when mistyped and underground programmers and blackhat marketers are using them to spread chaos across the web. Based on the study conducted by Sophos, the one-letter mistyped domains of the big websites on the web are the main target and everything from sites selling Viagra, to sites looking to hijack your computer are now resident on these mistyped domains.
Sophos is urging caution and makes the point that it may take a while before the sites like Facebook and Google can totally eradicate the mistyped domains being used to spread mayhem.
Have you been a victim of typosquatting? Share your experience below.