Another sign that the Internet has become the newest venue for political battles is the sheer number of websites that have sprung up that appear designed to confuse or take advantage of people following the 2020 US Presidential elections.
Researchers from Digital Shadows recently looked at how many domains they could find that appear to be targeting users who accidentally mistype the website address for a US political candidate or an election-related domain (for example berniesander.com instead of berniesanders.com).
They wanted to find out where exactly on the Internet individuals who made such typos would end up and discovered over 550 phony websites for the 19 Democratic and 4 Republican candidates and 11 other election-related domains as of Sept. 20, 2019.
About one quarter of the domains (24%) appeared harmless and simply 'parked' with no content. Another 8% appeared to be the result of the URLs not being correctly configured when initially created: many of these sites hosted nothing but an index page.
The remaining 68% of typosquatting sites, however, actively redirected people to entirely new sites - some of which could eventually end up being used for nefarious purposes. For example, Digital Shadows found that an individual who inadvertently typed elizibethwarren.com would get redirected to a donaldjtrump.com page. Similarly, someone entering donaldtrump.digital would instead end up on hillaryclinton.com.
Users wanting to donate to specific Republican candidates by going to the WinRed site get redirected to the ActBlue fundraising site for Democrats if they accidentally submit winrde.com instead of winred.com. Digital Shadows researchers found similar redirects for sites associated with several other candidates including ..
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