What Is Typosquatting?

Typosquatting is a malicious activity designed to trick those who incorrectly type a URL into a search engine. Hackers or cyber scammers will often create websites with matching URL addresses (like gogle.com vs. google.com) and will make them look nearly identical to the login homepage. This can be designed to gain your sign-in information or other data about you. Sometimes these sites will sell counterfeit products that are close to the original. 

Typosquatting scams can take the form of site imitation to gain advertising revenue by misdirecting traffic from popular sites. This can be done with related links and affiliate links or by using URLs with slightly different spellings. This behavior harms both businesses and users looking to purchase products or services with a reputable company. 

This tactic can lead to breaches in a person’s accounts if they choose to log in with a fake site. Since the typosquatters will now have access to the person’s email and password, they can enter their real accounts and gain any information they have stored there, including bank details, crypto exchange logins, social security numbers, login details for other sites and other sites many other types of sensitive information. 

Typosquatting is very similar to cybersquatting, in which case bad actors will purchase domain URLs that are as close as possible to popular brands like Nike or Apple. Since companies don’t want potential customers to fall prey to these scams, they will often buy the domains for large sums of money, and cybersquatters will benefit from the extortionary tactic.