Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.
September 3
Typosquatting
Imagine that someone registers the URL http://www.appie.com and then sends phishing emails to Apple customers with a capital "I", i.e. the URL is http://www.appie.com, but it looks like http://www.apple.com in a sans-serif font (AppIe versus Apple). Is this typosquatting, or is it something else? Typosquatting doesn't mention the use of lookalike characters, which if I understand rightly is particularly a major problem with Cyrillic сhагасtегs. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:10, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Nyttend backup: If you take a look at the typosquatting article, you can seeTyposquatting is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typos made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. which is not the case of substituting lowercase "L"s with uppercase "i"s. However, the article also mentionsOnce in the typosquatter's site, the user may also be tricked into thinking that they are in fact in the real site, through the use of copied or similar logos, website layouts or content. Spam emails sometimes make use of typosquatting URLs to trick users into visiting malicious sites that look like a given bank's site, for instance. which kinda suits this situation. IMO, it's not typosquatting. —AE(talk • contributions)13:14, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]