New McAfee Study Hightlights Dangerous Sites That Prey On Mistyped Web Addresses
McAfee, Inc. released a research report that spotlights a dangerous cyber practice known as typo-squatting. "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 portions of the Internet," said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and Product Development. "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, Inc. released a research report that spotlights a dangerous cyber practice known as typo-squatting. "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 portions of the Internet," said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and Product Development. "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."
