Dangerous Typos

Everyone can make typographical errors and misspellings. But on the internet, you’ve got to be careful about typos in the address bar of your browser. Those typos can be dangerous!

Typosquatting

First, you’ll want to understand cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is when someone reserves a domain name in bad faith, in order to gain some benefit. A cybersquatter might reserve “www.amazon.buzz”, knowing that it resembles the Amazon URL. They might grab that domain name to make ad revenue from accidental visitors, or they might own it simply because they want to sell it to the real Amazon someday, for an outlandish fee.

Typosquatting is a related practice, where someone grabs a domain that is a misspelled variant of a big name website. www.wakmart.com or www.difney.com or cgatgpt.com could one day be typosquatted URLs. But typosquatting isn’t about selling the domain for big bucks. It’s more often about laying traps, so that when random people misfinger things, they visit the typosquatted website and encounter a nasty Microsoft scam pop-up.

If you suddenly see your computer is “locked up” with a scary alert message, maybe you committed a typo in your address bar. Don’t panic! Press and hold your computer’s power button for 20 seconds, then turn your computer back on. When you return to the internet, do NOT “restore pages”, if it is offered to you.

Poisoned Search Results

Another address-bar-typo leads to other hazards. URLs do not allow you to type a space in them. If you do so accidentally, the browser will not take you to the website, and will instead divert you to search results. And the cybercrooks are often trying to poison the search results, so that their clever fakes rise to the top, for you to click on.

Consider an example, where I type in “www.lowes.com/survey”, but I make a mistake and press the spacebar instead of the forward slash key:

Half of the initial search results go to bogus websites. If I click on an impostor website, I run the risk of:

• wasting my time, filling out a survey on an unrelated website
• giving my info to spammers and attracting extra junk mail
• encountering yet another Microsoft Alert scam that locks up my screen

It used to be that you could protect against this by changing your default search engine. Or by installing a link-scanning browser extension. Not so much anymore. Impostor websites seem to turn up in almost all manner of web searches nowadays. You’ll want to learn to type meticulously and be very judgmental before clicking a new link.