A study by iMinds-Distrinet Stony Brook University and suggests that sites that are popular are usually the casualty of typosquatting. This can be the deliberate registration of domain names that resemble a current web site, but having a typo. Instead of reaching the site that is specified, the surfer arrives in the web site of the typosquatter.
Whenever the study took into account among these mistakes in the URL:
Losing one letter
Changing 2 letters
Characters that are doubling
Pressing on a key that is wrong
The outcomes are shocking: typosquatters are targeting 477 of the top 500 sites. In total, more than 17.000 of these ‘bogus’ sites are in the control of only 4 parties.
Even worse is the reality that a few of these sites are being used for phishing, where you arrive in a fraudulent site which asks for your own personal details. This is going to cause you to be a simple target for frauds and viruses. It’s astonishing that 3 out of banks or 4 large firms are not taking any measures to prevent this problem.