Strider Typo-Patrol: Discovery and Analysis of Large-Scale, Systematic Typo-Squatters

First Posted: 12/16/2005

Last Updated: 04/17/2006

 

 

Update 04/17/06:

 

·        This page is no longer up-to-date. See new data and information at http://research.microsoft.com/URLTracer.

 

 

Update 04/07/06:

 

 

Update 03/23/06:

·        We plan to release a light-weight version of the Strider Typo-Patrol tool so that trademark owners can have an automatic and systematic process of discovering and analyzing parked typo-squatting domains of their web sites. 

 

Project Summary:

·        In the Strider Typo-Patrol project, we develop an automated scanning system for discovering and analyzing typo-squatting domains. We show that a large number of such domains are parked with domain parking services to take advantage of their effective contextual-ads infrastructures. We also show that, by analyzing the ads-fetching traffic sent from typo domains to parking services, we are able to identify major typo-squatters and domain parking services that are heavily involved in large-scale, systematic typo-squatting, as well as those that are serving adult ads harmful to minors on typos of children’s web sites. See Strider Typo-Patrol Research Home Page for our methodology. This page presents a case study on a large-scale typo-squatter that use a major domain parking service.

·        It is very important to note that not all parked domains are typo-squatting domains; many of them are legitimate, generic domain names. In fact, some domain parking services actively ban all trademarks and typos of trademarks from their system and are rigid about those rules.

·        Example of how domain parking-based typo-squatting works:

1.      Visit http://DissneyChannel.com, a typo of http://DisneyChannel.com, and you’ll get a page that contains these lines: