TypoWriter: A Tool to Prevent Typosquatting

Typosquatting is a form of internet cybersquatting generated from the mistakes (typos) made by internet users while typing a website address. It often leads the user to another unintended website. Sometimes it is exploited by cybersquatters to attract website traffic by redirecting common typos of popular websites to some other sites with malicious contents. A possible solution is defensive registration of similar domains and redirecting requests to the original site. This would be affordable for the owner of the original domain if a short list of such probable typo domain names can be predicted. Existing works on typosquatting mostly try to detect typo sites by analyzing logs. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them can predict probable typo variations of a given URL at pre-registration phase. In this paper, we present TypoWriter, an RNN based error prediction tool to fill this gap. TypoWriter achieves a good performance in terms of successful predictions that match with the ground-truth. It is compared with five widely used typo generation tools and substantial improvement is observed.