Typosquatters are Leading Innocent Victims Astray

Typosquatting takes advantage of an inclination among internet users known as “fat fingers” — a tendency to hit the wrong keys and enter misspelled trademarks or brands. Like phishing, typosquatting is a type of social engineering that tricks people into visiting websites they didn’t intend to visit. These schemes can harm both consumers and the businesses whose names are abused. Connection to cybersquatting Typosquatting is connected to cybersquatting, where someone registers a site’s domain name that includes a trademark and then tries to profit by selling that name to the trademark owner. With typosquatting, fraudsters register URLs that are common misspellings of company and brand names. For example, a bad actor might register landswnd.com and lnadsend.com. Then, when users try to visit the site of retailer Lands’...

Typosquatters profit from common user errors

The Web has opened plenty of new avenues for criminal behavior. For example, you may have heard of cybersquatting. Someone registers a site’s domain name that includes a trademark and then tries to profit by selling that name to the trademark owner.  But are you familiar with typosquatting? You should be because typosquatters profit from common user errors.  These schemes can make just about any organization, along with visitors to its website, the victims of fraud. Fat fingers Like cybersquatting, typosquatting (also known as URL hijacking) involves the purchase of domain names in bad faith. It takes advantage of an inclination among users known as “fat fingers” — basically, our tendency to hit the wrong keys and enter misspelled trademarks or brands. For example, in a case involving...