
Spelling errors when typing a URL can be exploited by website-squatters: users are led to phony sites in a phenomenon we call parasitic URL naming. These phony sites imitate popular websites and try to extract personal information from unsuspecting users, or simply advertise and sell products to users. In this paper, we conduct a massive study in order to quantify the extent of this parasitic URL naming We start with a corpus of 900 popular websites, which we refer to as original URLs, and generate roughly 3 million URLs by varying the original names systematically and exhaustively. Over a period of 60 days, we analyze how many sites have URLs very similar to our original URLs. We find that parasitic URL naming is a wide-spread problem and quantify the extent of this issue. We believe that this work will provide the first step towards research and tools to combat web-fraud.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 22 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
