Typosquatting Intensifies Ahead of US Election

"Typosquats" — domains that feature common mistakes made when typing legitimate URLs — are on the rise ahead of the November US elections. Recent research from Digital Shadows shows that hundreds of these confusing sites have been registered in the last year.

The researchers broke the typosquat domains into three types: Redirects, which sent the user to a separate page were 12% of the total; misconfigured or illegitimate sites, which either have only a hosting notice or appear to be legitimate when they're not, were 21% of domains found; and nonmalicious sites, which either had no content at all or a small amount of brand-damaging content, were 67% of the total.

Digital Shadows reports that it anticipates an increase in voting-issue typosquats in the weeks and days leading up to the election. It already has found 47 potentially malicious domains that were parked, redirected to a different website, or were illegitimate/misconfigured.

For more, read here.