KPM

Charity Scams Employee Fraud Fraud Loss In Multiple Locations Early Revenue Recognition Liquidity Overload Keep Fraud Out Of Your Restaurant Guarding Against Fraud with Gen AI Lifestyle Analysis To Investigate Fraud Fraud prevention FinCEN Beneficial Owner Scam Vendor Fraud Residual Risk Antifraud Tax-Avoidance Scams Remote work Social Engineering in ACH/Wire Transfers Fraud risk Money Laundering Fraud FTC Accounts Receivable Phoenix Companies

Typosquatters Are Targeting Innocent Victims

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’ End but mistype the name, they may end up on a fake site that looks like the real one. Other human errors, such as typing the wrong URL extension (.com instead of .org) or omitting punctuation marks such as hyphens, also can work to typosquatters’ advantage.

According to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 research, the most commonly targeted sites include Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, and PayPal. But any business can be vulnerable to this type of fraud.

Valuable Information
The goal often is to divert users away from competitors or draw traffic to their own sites (often pornography or dating sites). The greatest risk for users is that they’ll be diverted to a site where they’re induced to enter login information or download malware. Resulting identity theft can make big money for fraud perpetrators.

Typosquatting also can be used for corporate espionage. In one case, a law firm sued a programmer who had obtained a domain name similar to its own, except for a minor typo. The law firm alleged that the defendant had used his doppelgänger domain name to create fake email accounts and intercept email sent to the firm.

Protect Online Assets
To protect your business from typosquatting schemes, routinely check mistyped versions of your URL. If you find a questionable site, try to contact the domain name owner. The owner may have an innocent explanation. But if you believe the owner has malicious intent, you may want to file a complaint using the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy or pursue litigation.

Related Articles

Talk with the pros

Our CPAs and advisors are a great resource if you’re ready to learn even more.