14 DAY TRIAL // Security experts found a few websites that were so well designed and so successful in spreading their fraudulent campaigns that they managed to gain a good position on the global Alexa ranking list.
Websense researchers report that the sites pretend to be part of YouTube and some of them even rank better than some major genuine portals.
By relying on typosquatting attacks, cybercriminals managed to promote their online survey scams which offer unsuspecting Internet users fabulous prizes such as iPhones and other cool gadgets.
Video reward survey campaigns such as this one can spread globally because there is no language barrier and their Alexa rank is usually high, but also, they’re not limited to certain countries or regions.
Furthermore, to make the scam sites even more authentic, a script checks the visitor’s IP and displays location information.
One of these shady video sites found by Websense is video-rewardz.com, which has a high Alexa rank since December 19, 2011. Unfortunately, the site is still active and its traffic is higher than ever.
So you may wonder how these typosquatting attacks work in this case.
The entire secret lies in the fact that many people rush to type a site’s name and easily make mistakes.
For instance, when we want to access Twitter, we type www.twitter.com, but we could also write www.ttwitter.com by mistake. Since sites like ttwitter.com are already owned by cybercriminals, they can place clever redirects that lead the user to sites such as video-rewardz.
Major players such as Google and Facebook already purchased most of these typosquatting domains, but Twitter hasn’t, giving hackers the opportunity to launch successful campaigns.
I advise you to be extra careful when writing a site’s name in the browser’s address bar to make sure you don’t end up in the wrong place. Malicious typosquatting sites not only host surveys, but they can also be set up to serve nasty pieces of malware.