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Typosquatting

What’s a typosquatting?

Typosquat­ting is a kind of cyber­squat­ting con­sist­ing in reg­is­ter­ing a domain name sim­i­lar to a gen­er­al­ly well-known domain name. It is based on typ­ing or spelling mis­takes done by web users at the time of the search, allow­ing to direct them towards anoth­er web­site than the one searched.

Exam­ples: credit-abricole.fr, creditmuuel.fr, le boncoim.fr…

Typosquat­ting which rep­re­sents almost 15% of the dis­putes, often brings the web user towards web­sites con­tain­ing « com­mis­sioned links » towards oth­er web­sites. If the web user clicks on one of these links, the inter­me­di­ary website’s own­er earns a com­mis­sion from the final website’s own­er.

Even worse, we begin to see the use of typosquat­ted names to direct the web user towards a web­site con­tain­ing a « mali­cious » page aimed to infect their com­put­er with a «mal­ware ».

Warn­ing, typosquat­ting allows to hijack, thanks to spelling or typ­ing mis­takes, a part of the mails addressed by the orig­i­nal domain name owner’s cus­tomers.

The con­se­quences can be par­tic­u­lar­ly severe when the cus­tomer com­mu­ni­cates by e‑mail, some con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion (bank, health, assur­ance…).

Typosquatting, various objectives:

  • To sell adver­tis­ing ban­ners on the home page;
  • To pro­pose com­peti­tors’ prod­ucts or ser­vices or com­ple­men­tary to the ones of the orig­i­nal web­site;
  • To redi­rect towards com­peti­tors’ web­sites;
  • Phish­ing cam­paign in order to obtain per­son­al infor­ma­tion to steal the iden­ti­ty of the tricked web user.

How to protect against typosquatting?

In order to be imme­di­ate­ly alert­ed from all cas­es of typosquat­ting affect­ing your brands, Nameshield pro­vides a mon­i­tor­ing of trade­marks and domain names reg­is­tra­tions.

For web users, how to detect frauds like typosquat­ting?

  • Check the website’s address and pay atten­tion to the URL’s spelling;
  • Check that the vis­it­ed web­site is secure and authen­ti­cat­ed by an SSL cer­tifi­cate;
  • Check the website’s pro­pri­ety data.

You can find recent cas­es of this kind of attack on the blog.

Source: Nameshield’s White paper – Under­stand­ing domain names