Typo Squatting- A New Way to Phishing

Our lives are always on wheels. We always aim to get tasks done as quickly as possible. The speed, as usual, can make you worry in some cases, isn’t it? Well, now you must be patient on Internet too while typing a website name as that rapidness in typing can hijack your online life. Typing a website name in hurry and making some typographic mistakes in it is quite a common scenario for most of us. Phishers out there has now targeted this very mistake of Internet users to succeed in their aim. Typo Squatting is becoming a new way of phishing. 

Most of big website out there (try it with Facebook!) predict your typing and take you on right webpage. But in most of cases, it might happen that you land on unintended location or in worst cases landing on a website that is identical to the one you were intended to go on. The main target of typo phishers is social networking sites or e-commerce websites where user’s typing error can be made him redirect to an unsecure page so that his personal details can be stolen. 

Websense Security Labs carried out survey to put forward statistics of such attacks and it has been found that 50% of identity theft attacks are from websites and out of it 80% are from website who claim themselves to be “safe”. Also, out of all links present on different websites, 62% of them are getting redirected to the malicious locations. 

But readers should not worry now! As top names in cyber security have put their heads in this matter and come up with a solution that would be implemented soon. So, keep surfing but be safe! You may also go through our guide on how to surf on internet without being noticed to make your online life secure.