Please use TWO HANDS to access AdultFriendFinder

SOURCE: theregister

Four hosts are behind one in two typosquatting attacks against the top 500 websites, research has found.

The hosts and their fellow fraudsters had registered domain names mimicking three-quarters of the internet's 500 most popular websites, say University of Leuven researchers Pieter Agten, Wouter Joosen, and Frank Piessens, who together with Stony Brook University bod Nick Nikiforakis studied typosquatted domains for seven months to produce the first longitudinal study of its kind.

The authors found "... up to 50 percent of all typosquatting domains can be traced back to just four typosquatting page hosters," the crew wrote in the paper Seven Months’ Worth of Mistakes: A Longitudinal Study of Typosquatting Abuse.

"In particular we reveal that, even though 95 percent of the popular domains we investigated are actively targeted by typosquatters, only few trademark owners protect themselves against this practice by proactively registering their own typosquatting domains."

A small fraction of those typosquatted domains -- such as gooogle.com for google.com -- were registered by the legitimate website in a bid to foil typosquatters.

…CONTINUE READING

 - Dating site news! aff, dating, news