![]() ![]() “The most valuable space in the internet is. DomainTools reports that more than 150,000 new, high risk COVID-19-themed domains have been registered since December 2019. Since it can affect firms of any size, you’re really then looking at hundreds of thousands of potential mimicry victims.”Ģ020 has seen many domain spoofing attempts relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiply this by the hundreds or thousands of well-known company names out there and you can see how extensive this activity is. “In the last 24 hours I observed 11 domains spoofing iCloud, and several of them included the term “support,” which strongly hints at credential harvesting,” he says. Helming says his company sees hundreds of squatting domain attempts every day. Typosquatting is not new, and the robust digital economy has meant interest in this type of attack rarely wanes. In some cases, typosquatted domains can be used in various attack campaign stages to achieve geopolitical objectives, such as network intrusion or data exfiltration.” How common is typosquatting? The endgame is usually theft of money, intellectual property, or other valuable data that can be sold or held for ransom. “The motivation is almost always financial in the end,” says Tim Helming, security evangelist at DomainTools, “though geopolitical motives can’t be dismissed either. Malware delivery: Install malware or offer malicious software downloads.Īctivism: Paint the targeted domain owner in a negative light, a use of typosquatting that is particularly common with political domains. Information theft: Harvest credentials and sensitive information either via phishing email or copied sites’ login pages, or harvest misaddressed email messages. Typosquatted domains can be used as the entirety of an attack or a smaller part of a larger campaign for these purposes:Įxtortion: Sell the typo domain back to the brand owner.Īd fraud: Monetize the domain with ads from visitors via incorrect spelling, redirect users to competitors, or redirect traffic back to the brand itself via an affiliate link and earning commission on every click. Registering a domain is quick and easy, and attackers can register several variations of the legitimate target domain at the same time. “Essentially, typosquatting is a lookalike domain with one or two wrong or different characters with the aim of trying to trick people onto the wrong webpage.” “Can you see the difference between and ?” says Russell Haworth, CEO of Nominet, which acts as the registry for the. Using similar looking letters to hide the false domain (ÇSÓOnliné.com).Combining related words into the domain ().A common misspelling of the target domain ( rather than, for example).Threat actors can impersonate domains using: They register domain names that are similar to legitimate domains of targeted, trusted entities in the hope of fooling victims into believing they are interacting with the real organization. A typosquatting attack, also known as a URL hijacking, a sting site, or a fake URL, is a type of social engineering where threat actors impersonate legitimate domains for malicious purposes such as fraud or malware spreading. ![]()
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