Harm Caused by Typosquatting Is Still Modest, Research Suggests

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Harm Caused by Typosquatting Is Still Modest, Research Suggests

By CircleID Reporter
November 09, 2015, 8:09 pm PST Views: 10,790 Add Comment

Harm caused by domain name typosquatting is still modest, to both the user and the brand holder, and investment on anti-typosquatting products should be cautious, according to a paper published in Security and Privacy (SP), 2015 IEEE Symposium titled, “Every Second Counts: Quantifying the Negative Externalities of Cybercrime via Typosquatting.” The paper presents a strategy for quantifying the harm caused by the cybercrime of typo squatting via an intent inference technique.

Zhou Li, one of the authors who worked on the study writes: “Surprisingly, our result shows typosquatting only costs a typical user 1.3 seconds per typosquatting event over the alternative of receiving a browser error page. Many typosquatters actually improve the latency between a typo and its correction, probably due to the faster responses from typo domains. Regarding brand holders, their legitimate sites lose approximately 5% of the mistyped traffic over the alternative of an unregistered typo and the negative externality ratio (money losses for brand holders over revenues for cybercriminals) is 18:1, much lower than 100:1 for spam. These results suggest that the harm caused by typosquatting is still modest, to both the user and the brand holder, and investment on anti-typosquatting products should be cautious.”

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

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