Take a look at the following website addresses. Are they spelled correctly?
www.gooogle.com
www.yahooo.com
www.msn.m.co
(Note: Please do not click on the links or turn to the internet for the answer. Just visually examine whether they are spelled correctly.)
If you are familiar with popular websites, the answer would be “no.” Unfortunately, popular websites are a frequent target of mal-intenders who know that misspellings sometimes do happen.
Their desire is to redirect – or hijack – you to someplace else: a similar (but malicious) website, a porn site, a virus download, etc. They do so by purchasing domain names that look similar to popular websites, expecting you to click on a link, type the wrong spelling, or add the wrong ending without noticing.
I once discovered this with one of my organization’s websites. We owned the “.org” address while someone else purchased the “.com.” A tech-user had accidentally typed the wrong ending and found herself looking at a porn site.
Like a good tech-hero, I swooped in to save the day. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much I could do. Our website was intact. The mal-intender offered to take the offending site down if we paid them a lot of money.
Unfortunately, the internet is a rather lawless land, so there isn’t much that can be done about these situations besides avoiding them to begin with.