McAfee Warns About Typosquatting
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By Article Writers Inc. Published Nov 20, 2007 Click to contact me |
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McAfee Inc released a research report titled "What's in a name: The state of typo squatting 2007." This report highlights an upcoming dangerous practice called typo squatting where people register domains using misspelled versions of common brands so that people get redirected to their websites.Thus innocent people get involved in controversies and start flooding email inboxes with spam. According to Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of McAfee, this practice makes people see things they would not think about in their wildest dreams and takes away loyal consumers of other businesses. They use 'get-rich-quick' offers as a bait to attract prospective innocent customers. As of today there are 1.9 million variations of 2771 popular domain names.
An example of typo squatting is the iPhone recently introduced by Apple. By the end of the year 2007, over 8000 websites using the word "iPhone" will be flourishing on the Internet. Some could be fan portals or gossip portals while some could be run by hackers. But none of them would have any association whatsoever with Apple.
Some of the other findings in this report are:
-1 out of 14 wrongly spelt website names would make a person prey to a typo squatter, the main target for typo squatters are websites meant for children. Some such websites are webkinz.com , clubpenquin.com and neopets.com. These target children below 18 years.
-Typo squatters take advantage of spelling mistakes made by children and expose them to pornography. 46000 typo squatter sites contain adult material. Five of the most highly squatted sites are: Game sites (14% likelihood of being squatted) such as miniclip.com, runescape.com and minijuegos.com.
-Airline sites (11.4% likelihood) such as ryanair.com, united.com , and lufthansa.com. Mainstream media sites (10.8%) such as vh1.com, globo.com and qvc.com. Dating sites (10.2%) such as plentyoffish.com, true.com and singlesnet.com.
-Technology and Web 2.0-related sites (9.6%)
Automated ad syndication services help typo squatters make more money. One search engine has ads of 19.3% typo squatters.
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