"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.
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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.