Techno Sider

New McAfee research puts the spotlight on a dangerous cyber practice known as "typo-squatting".

The McAfee report titled, "What's in a Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007", reveals how typo-squatters register domains using common misspellings of popular brands, products, and people in order to redirect consumers to alternative Web sites.

These squatter-run sites generate click-through advertising revenues, lure unsuspecting consumers into scams, and harvest email addresses to flood users with unwanted email.

McAfee has reviewed 1.9 million variations of 2,771 of the most popular domain names to arrive at these results.

According to Jeff Green, senior vice president (Avert Labs and Product Development) of McAfee, "Typo-squatting illustrates the 'Wild West' mentality that remains dominant in major portions of the Internet. Even at its most benign, this practice takes consumers to places they never intended, and penalizes legitimate businesses by siphoning customers away, or making them pay a charge to re-acquire customers. At its worst, typo-squatting leads to online scams, 'get-rich-quick' offers, and other risks."

McAfee cites a recent example of typo-squatting as 'iPhone mania', saying that even though Apple's iPhone appeared on the market just a few months ago, there would be at least 8,000 URLs using the word 'iPhone' by the end of this year. With some fan- or rumor- sites, and others run by hackers and spammers. The only factor common to them all is that they have no affiliation whatsoever to Apple.

The McAfee study highlights: that a typical consumer who misspells a popular URL has a one-in-14 chance of landing at a typo-squatter site;
that children's sites are heavily targeted; and that some typo-squatters may even take advantage of typos to expose children to pornography.

As per the study, the five most highly squatted categories are game sites like miniclip.com, runescape.com, and minijuegos.com; airline sites like ryanair.com, united.com, and lufthansa.com; mainstream media sites like vh1.com, globo.com, and gvc.com; dating sites like plentyoffish.com, true.com, and singlesnet.com; and technology and Web 2.0 related sites

Five non-US countries most likely to have popular sites squatted are: the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. And, five non-US countries least likely to have popular sites squatted are: the Netherlands, Israel, Denmark, Brazil, and Finland.

Interestingly, McAfee notes that "typo-squatting" is not a new phenomenon. Also that with the emergence of new, top-level domains; more automatic registration tools; and in general, proliferation of parking portal sites, all these are typically feeding the phenomenon.

As a precautionary measure, McAfee advises customers to use the McAfee SiteAdvisor, which is downloadable for free at http://us.mcafee.com.