techblog 

Typo-squatting is the practice of registering a domain name with the intent to confuse it with the name of a trademark or a famous other domain name

In March, I presented the paper Typo-Squatting: The “Curse” of Popularity in the poster session of the first International Conference on Web Science in Athens. The paper, written together with co-authors David Duce and Faye Mitchell (Oxford Brookes University) and Stephen Morris (Nominet) can be downloaded here.

In the paper we study typo-squatting from a statistical point of view. The distribution of names in the co.uk registry is analysed using the concepts of syntactic and visual neighbourhoods of a domain name (the sets of all other domain names which are syntactically or visually similar to to it).  Our preliminary results show a strong correlation between the popularity of a domain name and the size of its syntactical and visual neighbourhoods although, counter-intuitively, the neighbourhood size does not depend on length.  This suggests anomalous activity “around” very popular domain names, as well as indicating that the size of the neighbourhood can be used as a reliable indicator for the likelihood of being typo-squatted.