A user study of the effectiveness of typosquatting techniques
Jeffrey Spaulding, Ah Reum Kang, Shambhu Upadhyaya, Aziz Mohaisen · 2016
The nefarious practice of cyber typosquatting involves deliberately registering Internet domain names containing typographical errors that primarily target popular domain names in an effort to steal their traffic for monetary gain. Typosquatting has existed for well over two decades and continues to be a credible threat to this day. In this work, we discuss the results of a user study that exposes subjects to several uniform resource locators (URLs) in an attempt to determine the effectiveness of several typosquatting techniques that are prevalent in the wild. We also attempt to determine if security education and awareness of cybercrimes such as typosquatting will affect the behavior of Internet users.