For more than a decade, aggressive website registrants have been engaged in ‘typosquatting’ — the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website addresses. Uses for the diverted traffic have evolved over time, ranging from hosting sexually-explicit content to phishing. Several countermeasures have been implemented, including outlawing the practice and developing policies for resolving disputes. Despite these efforts, typosquatting remains rife.

But just how prevalent is typosquatting today, and why is it so pervasive? Ben Edelman and I set out to answer these very questions. In Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting (appearing at the Financial Cryptography conference), we estimate that at least 938,000 typosquatting domains target the top 3,264 .com sites, and we crawl more than 285,000 of these domains to analyze their revenue sources.
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