Typosquatting

Methodology

In an effort to more clearly understand typosquatting, we focused our attention on target domains that receive at least two million visitors per month. Since traffic ultimately equates to revenue for those who leverage pay-per-click advertising on their names, this focus ensures that we had meaningful data to work from. After identifying the list of target domains, the sample was further limited to domain roots-the part of the domain to the left of the first dot-that were a minimum of six characters in length in order to allow for the analysis of a greater number of permutations of names that can be registered and entered into browsers. Doing so also helped to ensure that a typo of a target domain in our data set was unlikely to be a different correctly spelled word.

With the resulting list of domain names, we generated a total of 13,198 single-character typo variation domain names. We then estimated the traffic to each typo domain name in order to compare it to the traffic received by the target domain. Finally, we categorized 3,000 of the highest trafficked typo domains by specific type of mistake in order to draw conclusions about which mistakes can be most successfully monetized by criminals and where a brand’s attention is most needed.

Key Results

The three most common types of single-letter typing mistakes are:

• inclusion of an extra letter (29%)
• inclusion of an incorrect letter (23%)
• omission of a letter (20%)

The three most common TLD registrations among the TLDs we surveyed are:

• dot-COM (70%)
• dot-NET (13%)
• dot-ORG (9%)
  

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