Reporting on this latest cybersecurity issue, Tom Kelchner, research security manager with Sunbelt Security, said that sites such as faceboik.com and gacebook.com – both keyboard typos on a standard QWERTY keyboard – will land you, respectively, on fake survey pages and index pages routing to a 'Facebook login page.'
In the latter case, Kechner notes that the phrase `'Face Book Login' seems to be used in a slightly euphemistic way on this site, as though they were really saying 'click this link, fool!'.
The Sunbelt research manager also said that, whilst he and his team did not undertake a comprehensive survey of all the mistyping possibilities, there are quite a few mispells lurking.
"There are eight letters in 'facebook' and 42 letters and numbers on the keyboard. That's 336 combinations for just one wrong letter. It might be full-time work for somebody", he said, adding that the moral of the story is that users need to watch their typing.
This is especially true, Infosecurity notes, in the UK, where there is no law in someone setting up, for example, a web site such as www.bbcnews.co.uk with some tempting advertising affiliate routes, and waiting for the ad revenue to flow in.
The BBC has pre-empted this type of typosquatting by registering and creating its own 'bogon' index pages such as this, but US organisations are more fortunate, as the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act contains a clause aimed at combatting typosquatting.
Unfortunately for US internet users, in 2006, a precedent setting case involving the controversial evangelist Jerry Falwell failed to persuade the US Supreme Court to overturn a decision involving the www.fallwell.com site, which critics of Falwell's had apparently created to overtly criticise him.
The essence of the case was that, because the typosquatting site did not mimic the style and layout of the legitimate site, it was not classed as an unfair business practice.