More and more fraudulent sites have wrestled their way onto Alexa’s global top 250 ranking list thanks to typosquatting, a technique that attackers use to deceive users into clicking into the wrong website.
According to security firm Websense, users who have fat-fingered Twitter’s Web address are driving massive amounts of traffic to one of these fake, spam-ridden sites. As of Wednesday, the site, video-rewardz.com, has seen a whopping 786 percent jump in pageviews on Alexa over the past month, globally.
This isn’t particularly surprising when one considers how popular Twitter.com is. Websense discovered the attackers registered URLs such as ttwitter.com, twwitter.com, twiitter.com and other variations on the address in hopes that users might accidentally enter an errant ‘T’ or ‘W’ when going to the site. Those that do are brought to a scam page that encourages them to take a video reward survey to “have the opportunity” to get a Macbook Air, iPhone 4S or iPad 2.
While sites like Facebook and Google have purchased similar domains, Twitter hasn’t yet followed suit, creating a golden opportunity for online scammers.
For more on this, head over to Websense’s Security Labs Blog.
