Abstract
We describe a method for identifying “typosquatting”, the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website addresses. We estimate that at least 938 000 typosquatting domains target the top 3 264 .com sites, and we crawl more than 285 000 of these domains to analyze their revenue sources. We find that 80% are supported by pay-per-click ads, often advertising the correctly spelled domain and its competitors. Another 20% include static redirection to other sites. We present an automated technique that uncovered 75 otherwise legitimate websites which benefited from direct links from thousands of misspellings of competing websites. Using regression analysis, we find that websites in categories with higher pay-per-click ad prices face more typosquatting registrations, indicating that ad platforms such as Google AdWords exacerbate typosquatting. However, our investigations also confirm the feasibility of significantly reducing typosquatting. We find that typosquatting is highly concentrated: Of typo domains showing Google ads, 63% use one of five advertising IDs, and some large name servers host typosquatting domains as much as four times as often as the web as a whole.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Brand Owners Could Have Prevented $220 Millio. In: Domain Name Recovery By Spending $1 Million. Corporation Service Company (August 24, 2009)
Damerau, F.J.: A Technique for Computer Detection and Correction of Spelling Errors. Communications of the ACM 7(3), 171–176 (1964)
Edelman, B.: Domains Reregistered for Distribution of Unrelated Content: A Case Study of Tina’s Free Live Webcam (2002), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/renewals/
Edelman, B.: How Google and Its Partners Inflate Measured Conversion Rates and Increase Advertisers’ Costs (2009), http://www.benedelman.org/news/051309-1.html
Edelman, B.: Large-Scale Registration of Domains with Typographical Errors (2003), http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/typo-domains/
Levenshtein, V.I.: Binary Codes Capable of Correcting Deletions, Insertions, and Reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady (1966)
Lands’ End, Inc. v. Eric Remy, et al, W.D.Wis (2006)
MTV Networks v. Curry, 867 F.Supp. 202. SDNY (1994)
The Neiman Marcus Group Inc., et al., v. Dotster Inc., et al, W.D.Wa (2006)
Perez, M.: Verizon wins $33 Million In Cybersquatting Case. Information Week (December 30, 2008)
Vulcan Golf, LLC, et al., v. Google, Inc., et al. N.D.Ill. Case No 1:2007cv03371
Wang, Y., Beck, D., Wang, J., Verbowski, C., Daniels, B.: Strider Typo-Patrol: Discovery and Analysis of Systematic Typo-Squatting. In: 2nd USENIX Workshop on Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet (SRUTI) (July 2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Moore, T., Edelman, B. (2010). Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting. In: Sion, R. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6052. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14577-3_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14577-3_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14576-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14577-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)