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| Cyber squatting returns with a bang |
| Kirtika Suneja / New Delhi Sep 03, 2009, 00:24 IST |
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Cyber squatting or registering a domain name with the intent of misusing a brand or trademark has gained momentum. Conglomerates like Tata Sons and Mahindra & Mahindra were recently victims of this.
Cyber squatting is an illegal activity of buying and officially recording an address on the internet, which is the name of an existing company or a well-known person, with the intention of selling it to the owner in order to make money. It is the source of almost 90 per cent of all infections.
“Cyber squatters essentially make use of the popularity of certain domain names to make money. A lesser known variation of cyber squatting is typo squatting which refers to the practice of registering a domain name similar to that of a legitimate website. For example, symantc.com instead of symantec.com,” explained Shantanu Ghosh, VP India product Operation, Symantec.
So, if the user makes a typo while typing the name of a site on the web browser, there’s a chance they will end up on the squatter’s site instead of the legitimate site. The squatter’s site may be a page loaded with ads that generate revenue for them, a page that exploits a browser vulnerability to load malicious code, adware, or spyware to the computer, or a phishing site designed to look like the site one meant to go to.
“Some of the squatters even put derogatory comments about the person or company the domain is meant to represent in an effort to encourage the subject to buy the domain from them. Cyber squatting has been a global phenomenon and off late is filtering into Asia as well. The main reason for the growth of cyber squatting is the availability of internet domain names at a very low cost,” noted Abhinav Karnwal, product marketing manager, APEC Trend Micro.
However, many companies have begun registering domain names based on common typos in their actual names. “For example, if you type symnatec.com on your browser, you’ll be redirected to symantec.com. Unfortunately, this works for typos within the domain name itself, but not if the users leave the ‘o’ out of .com and instead type .cm, they just land on the squatter’s site,” added Ghosh.
Clarification
Cyber squatting is not a crime as this article seems to indicate. However, companies have been known to go to courts in their attempts to evict cyber squatters.
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