If you ever make a mistake spelling the name of a product or a person on the Internet, you may end up at a site of a "typo-squatter" that you will regret having visited.
The trend, known as "typo-squatting", is posing an increasing threat in the cyber world, according to a new report by the security technology firm McAfee.
It reveals that consumers who misspell a popular URL (Internet address) have a 1-in-14 chance of landing on a typo-squatter site.
Typo-squatters register domains using common misspellings of popular brands -- products and people -- to redirect consumers to alternative websites. These sites then earn click-through advertising revenues by luring consumers into scams and harvest email addresses to flood users with unwanted emails.
The McAfee report cites the example of the iPhone mania, noting that even though Apple's new phone appeared in the market just a few months ago, there will likely be at least 8,000 URLs using the word 'iPhone' by the end of this year.
Some will be fan sites or rumour sites, while others will be run by hackers and scammers. What most of them have in common is that they have no affiliation with Apple.
To quantify the scope of the study, McAfee reviewed 1.9 million variations of 2,771 of the most popular domain names.
"Even at its most benign, this practice takes consumers to places they never intended to visit and hurts legitimate businesses by siphoning customers away or making them pay a charge to re-acquire customers. At its worst, typo-squatting leads to online scams, 'get-rich-quick' offers and other risks," notes Jeff Green, senior vice-president of McAfee Avert Labs and Product Development.
The study identifies gaming, airlines, mainstream media, dating and technology websites as the five most highly-squatted categories. The report also reveals that children's sites are also heavily targeted.
Some typo-squatters take advantage of typing errors to expose children to pornography. 2.4 per cent, or more than 46,000 of the typo-squatter sites tested, include some adult content, and some of those are squatters of children's properties, the study reveals.
It is not a new phenomenon, though. Cyber-squatting cases filed with the World Intellectual Property Organisation's arbitration system increased 20 per cent in 2005 and another 25 per cent in 2006.
However, typo-squatting is increasing, notes the report. The emergence of new, top-level domains, automatic registration tools, and the proliferation of parking portal sites that make it easy to generate pay-per-click revenue from squatted sites are all contributing to its growth.