You've Been Tricked! A User Study of the Effectiveness of Typosquatting Techniques

The deceitful practice of Typosquatting involves deliberately registering Internet domain names containing typographical errors that primarily target popular domain names, in an effort to redirect users to unintended destinations or steal traffic for monetary gain. Typosquatting has existed for well over two decades and continues to be a credible threat to this day. While much of the prior work has examined various typosquatting techniques and how they change over time, none have considered how effective they are in deceiving users. In this paper, we attempt to fill in this gap by conducting a user study that exposes subjects to several uniform resource locators (URLs) in an attempt to determine the effectiveness of several typosquatting techniques that are prevalent in the wild. We also attempt to determine if the security education and awareness of cybercrimes such as typosquatting will affect the behavior of Internet users.