New McAfee study highlights dangerous internet sites that prey on mistyped web addresses

"What's In A Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007," exposes 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. To quantify the scope of the study, McAfee reviewed 1.9 million variations of 2,771 of the most popular domain names.

"Typo-squatting illustrates the Wild West mentality that remains dominant in major parts of the Internet," states Patrick Hayati, Regional Director, McAfee Middle East. "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."

The study cites the iPhone mania as a recent example of typo-squatting, noting that even though Apple's new phone appeared on the market just a few months ago, there will likely be at least 8,000 URLs using the word "iPhone" by the end of this year. Some will be fan sites or rumor sites, while others will be run by hackers and scammers. What most have in common is that they have no affiliation with Apple.

"What's In a Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007" quantifies both the significant scope of the overall problem and also the differences among major Web categories. Among the key findings:

•A typical consumer who misspells a popular URL has a 1 in-14 chance of landing at a typo-squatter site

•Children's sites are heavily targeted: More than 60 of the most squatted sites are designed to appeal to the 18-and-under demographic, with squatters targeting domains like webkinz.com, clubpenquin.com and neopets.com

•Some typo-squatters take advantage of typing errors to expose children to adult material. In fact, 2.4 percent, or more than 46,000 of the typo-squatter sites tested, include some adult content, and some of those sites are squatters of children's properties.

•The five most highly squatted categories 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 enable many typo-squatter sites to make money; in fact one search engine's ads show up on 19.3% of all suspected typo-squatter sites in this study

•The Middle East (1.8%) ranked in the 8th position along with Sweden and Poland among the non-U.S. countries that have popular sites squatted. McAfee checked 9,279 sites from the Middle East and found 163 suspected squatters.

The study notes that typo-squatting is not a new phenomenon—cyber-squatting cases filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization's arbitration system increased 20% in 2005 and another 25% in 2006—but it is increasing.

The emergence of new, top-level domains, automatic registration tools, and the proliferation of parking portal sites that make it easy to generate pay-per-click revenue from squatted sites are all contributing to its growth.

Taking action against typo-squatting

To help consumers avoid typo-squatted sites, McAfee SiteAdvisor™, the advance warning protection safe search and surf tool, assigns a yellow "caution" rating to any site that triggers its typo-squatting criteria. In the event that a Web site presents a higher risk to consumers, McAfee issues a red (warning) label. For explicitly dangerous Web sites that are documented to cause exploits or phishing attacks, McAfee SiteAdvisor redirects the consumer to a safe online location.

The report also cites that many search engines such as Yahoo and Google now routinely offer alternatives for common misspellings, reducing the likelihood of landing at a typo site by accident. In addition, the report provides information about companies and organizations joining in the battle against malicious typo-squatting including Microsoft which offers a free tool that allows interested individuals to find and analyze squatters.