What is Typosquatting, Why It’s Important That I Care About It and How to Avoid It

From Abi Tyas Tunggal, writing for UpGuard:

Typosquatting, or URL hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting targeting people that accidentally mistype a website address directly into their web browser URL field. Cybersquatters register domain names that are a slight variation of the target brand (usually a common spelling error).

Internet users are usually unaware that they’re navigating, or even shopping, on a dummy website. Fraudulent website owners could leverage this identity theft to sell competitive products, or worse, trick users into a Personal Identifiable Information breach.

How does typosquatting work?

Typosquatting is made possible by typos, misspellings or misunderstandings of a popular domain name. If a user makes a mistake while typing a domain name and fails to notice it, they may accidentally end up on an alternative website set up by the cybercriminals.

One of the earliest examples of a typosquatting cybercrime was in 2006 when Google was the victim of typosquatting by the site Goggle.com, widely considered to be a phishing/fraud site. Typosquatters also had their sights on URLs like foogle.com, hoogle.com, boogle.com, yoogle.com, toogle.com, and roogle.com due to their close physical proximity to g. This can be a major cybersecurity risk if your business gets a large volume of traffic.

There are at least eight kinds of typosquatting…

For the rest, please click here.