Large-Scale Analysis of Pop-Up Scam on Typosquatting URLs

TL;DR

This study conducts a large-scale analysis of pop-up scams on typosquatting domains, revealing their prevalence, maliciousness, and targeting strategies to better understand and detect such online scams.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive large-scale analysis of pop-up scams on typosquatting domains, including classification of targeting parameters and scam characteristics.

Findings

Out of 8255 URLs, 8828 pop-ups were malicious.

Most URLs targeted a single user agent.

Pop-up scams vary based on user agent and language.

Abstract

Today, many different types of scams can be found on the internet. Online criminals are always finding new creative ways to trick internet users, be it in the form of lottery scams, downloading scam apps for smartphones or fake gambling websites. This paper presents a large-scale study on one particular delivery method of online scam: pop-up scam on typosquatting domains. Typosquatting describes the concept of registering domains which are very similar to existing ones while deliberately containing common typing errors; these domains are then used to trick online users while under the belief of browsing the intended website. Pop-up scam uses JavaScript alert boxes to present a message which attracts the user's attention very effectively, as they are a blocking user interface element. Our study among typosquatting domains derived from the Alexa Top 1 Million list revealed on 8255 distinct typosquatting URLs a total of 9857 pop-up messages, out of which 8828 were malicious. The vast majority of those distinct URLs (7176) were targeted and displayed pop-up messages to one specific HTTP user agent only. Based on our scans, we present an in-depth analysis as well as a detailed classification of different targeting parameters (user agent and language) which triggered varying kinds of pop-up scams.