Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive, six-year analysis of combosquatting, revealing its persistent and evolving use in various cyberattacks, emphasizing the need for heightened security measures.

Contribution

First large-scale empirical analysis of combosquatting, demonstrating its longevity, increasing activity, and diverse malicious uses across DNS data.

Findings

60% of combosquatting domains last over 1,000 days

Increasing activity of combosquatting year over year

Used for phishing, social engineering, and other attacks

Abstract

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records---collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.