Sometimes, attackers buy typosquatted domains with the hope that they draw in enough customers of a big corporation that this same organisation will then pay them a big fee to buy the fake domain off them. Similarly it may include a redirection to the real website but does so through affiliate links. For instance, the point of the typosquatting attack may be to fill the web page with advertisements and get paid a commission from the views and clicks. What is the impact of typosquatting?Ī typosquatting attack may vary in its threat level mainly since it depends on the typosquatter’s intentions and motives. Combosquatting may also be used by an attacker to convince the victim of a phishing attack that the website is legitimate such as by using instead of. For example, a user would walk straight into an attacker’s trap by deciding to use instead of with the intent of logging into their account. Using combosquattingĬombosquatting is a technique in which there are no mistakes in the name itself but rather a word similar to the subject of the website or organisation is added. Such URLs are more commonly known as doppelganger domains. By not including such punctuation when it should be or by introducing them when they shouldn’t be, a whole new URL is created. URLs may contain hyphens or other punctuation marks normally used to separate words such as rather than. A popular mistake is using the country code. Therefore it may be the case that the incorrect country code is entered. The country code is what follows the first part of the TLD and serves to identify the country of origin of the website. The fake URL may hence be exactly the same as the real one but with a different TLD such as. gov represents a government entity while. The top-level domain (TLD) is the first part that follows after the dot and serves to indicate the objective of the website. A user may doubt whether the domain name is singular (and vice versa) and chooses to attempt to enter it instead of double checking. This technique is quite self-explanatory. This is very similar to the previous examples but instead of relying on the user making a mistake when typing, different spellings of certain words are used with the hope that the target user prefers to spell a particular word in the manner chosen by the attacker (e.g. One such example is the word “accommodation” which people misspell as “acommodation” or “accomodation”. Therefore, including such words in a fake domain may cause more traffic than anticipated. In particular, there are certain words that people seem to confuse the way they are spelt with a greater frequency than others. Not everyone can easily pick up on a misspelled word, especially if it is not in the person’s primary language. Similarly, the attacker would replace letters with those adjacent to them on a keyboard or if they want to get the user to innocently click on it, swap one or more characters with similar looking ones (e.g. Doubling the wrong letter or writing it multiple times is an easy typo to make when typing fast. One of the most famous examples of this type of typosquatting is the website “” (meant to impersonate Google) which back when it was first registered, attempted to install malicious software on the visitor’s computer. Most commonly, a malicious actor would take advantage of a user’s haste when typing in the domain name and quickly pressing ‘enter’ which redirects them to a fake website in the process. Examples of typosquattingĪ typosquatted URL would look very similar to the real URL but would make use of one or more of the differences discussed in the subsequent sections. The hacker in question may not have criminal motives, but rather uses such domains to advertise their own product or service due to the traffic to this commonly misspelled URL - a term commonly known as malvertising. For example, while reading this definition, have you noticed that the word “looking” has been spelled incorrectly with a capital ‘i’? This is one of the techniques used by hackers when leading an innocent user to a fake site, along with a similar look and feel of the real site, to trick them into inputting sensitive information. More commonly, the malicious party relies on the human brain’s inability to differentiate between two similar Iooking characters when sending a phishing link. Typosquatting phishing, also known as typo-phishing or typo-scamming, is a form of phishing in which a cyber-criminal relies on users making typos when manually typing in a URL which leads them to a different website instead.
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