Typosquatting

Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of cybercrime and brand abuse in which someone registers a name that differs only slightly from a popular one, such as a missing letter, swapped characters, an extra hyphen, a different domain ending or look-alike characters from another alphabet. Users who mistype the address or fail to notice the difference land on a site controlled by the squatter, which may show advertising, sell counterfeit goods, or imitate a bank, exchange or wallet to harvest passwords and recovery phrases as part of phishing and spear phishing campaigns. In software, attackers publish packages with names close to popular libraries, hoping developers will install them by mistake, a route into a supply chain attack. A related crypto trick, address poisoning, relies on look-alike wallet addresses. Defences include bookmarking important sites, checking addresses carefully and brands registering common misspellings themselves.