– A typical consumer who misspells a popular URL has a 1 in-14 chance of landing at a typo-squatter site

– Children’s sites are heavily targeted: More than 60 of the most squatted sites are designed to appeal to the 18-and-under demographic, with squatters targeting domains like webkinz.com, clubpenquin.com and neopets.com

– Some typo-squatters take advantage of typing errors to expose children to pornography. In fact, 2.4 percent, or more than 46,000 of the typo-squatter sites tested, include some adult content, and some of those sites are squatters of children’s properties.

– The five most highly squatted categories are:

— Game sites (14% likelihood of being squatted) such as miniclip.com, runescape.com and minijuegos.com

— Airline sites (11.4% likelihood) such as ryanair.com, united.com, and lufthansa.com

— Mainstream media sites (10.8%) such as vh1.com, globo.com and qvc.com

— Dating sites (10.2%) such as plentyoffish.com, true.com and singlesnet.com

— Technology and Web 2.0-related sites (9.6%)

– Automated ad syndication services enable many typo-squatter sites to make money; in fact one search engine’s ads show up on 19.3% of all suspected typo-squatter sites in this study

– The five non-U.S. countries most likely to have popular sites squatted are: the United Kingdom (7.7%), Portugal (6.5%), Spain (5.9%), France (5.4%), and Italy (4.1%)

– The five non-U.S. countries least likely are: the Netherlands (1.5%), Israel (1.1%), Denmark (1.0%), Brazil (0.9%) and Finland (0.1%)

The study notes that typosquatting is not new. They say that the number of cybersquatting cases filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s arbitration system increased 20 percent in 2005 and another 25 percent in 2006.

To check out the entire list of findings of this study go here:
www.mcafee.com/typosquatters

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