Typosquatting increases as cyber criminals aim to catch out Christmas shoppers

Nearly 2,000 examples of 'typosquatting', affecting the internet sites of major high-street brands, has been detected.

Websense Security Labs has uncovered increased evidence of typosquatting, where cyber criminals create mirrors of popular shopping sites equivalent to Argos, John Lewis and Debenhams, in an effort to steal customer data. Web shoppers fall victim to the scam by mistyping web addresses and ending up with an infected computer.

Websense discovered nearly 2,000 typosquatted domains, including ‘debenahams', ‘johlewis' and ‘argoss', where the page looks as if a retailer's site, but where the user is resulted in a phishing or other potentially harmful site that injects malware or infects their system with spyware.

It also claimed that cyber criminals are registering variants of legitimate sites with false suffixes together with '.org' or '.net'; in October, Websense noticed that cyber criminals were registering huge numbers of pretend website domains in preparation for the Christmas shopping spree.

Elad Sharf at Websense Security Labs said: “Cyber criminals are smart at enticing Christmas shoppers to unwanted sites. While this appears like a client problem, typosquatting also puts companies' confidential data in danger as many employees shop from work computers at lunchtime.

“Careful typing helps, but seriously is not enough, so it's highly recommended that businesses install real-time email and web security, in addition to solutions that prevent theft and lack of confidential information, protection that traditional antivirus and firewall products don't provide.”