Typosquatters make big money

Analysts from the research company Godai Group attempted to measure the scale of the typosquatter business.

To do this, the experts registered several domain names similar in spelling to well-known websites, including Fortune 500 resources. After six months of operation, the owners of these lookalike domains received over 20 GB of emails. The senders had misspelled the address. Over six months, the report's authors received over 120,000 messages.

These emails often contained confidential information, including logins and passwords for corporate systems, business documents, and a host of other data. The experiment's authors noted that this information could easily aid hackers in breaching websites or corporate networks. Furthermore, the emails could also contain corporate secrets, such as correspondence between top managers, information about personnel transfers, and much more.

Interestingly, the duplicate domains did not have email addresses; the site owners simply kept their mail servers running.

Experts cited emails received from employees of IBM's Swedish division as one example of this type of interception. Their mail server operates under the domain se.ibm.com, and the experiment's authors registered the domain seibm.com.

After analyzing the results obtained, the authors of the experiment came to the conclusion that of the 500 largest global companies, every third, or 151, are vulnerable to this type of attack.

It's worth noting that for most companies, lookalike domains, which differ from the original domains by one or two letters, are already taken. Often, lookalike domains belong to users in China.