Dark Web Typosquatting: Scammers v. Tor

guest · Mar 21, 2019

Dark Web Typosquatting: Scammers v. Tor
March 21, 2019
https://www.digitalshadows.com/blog-and-research/dark-web-typosquatting-scammers-v-tor/

Typosquats involve changing a character in a URL so that it still looks like the original domain at first glance; for example, changing an “m” to an “rn”. We see squats all the time, but what caught my eye was that these weren’t for legitimate businesses, they were for criminal dark web sites, specifically on the Tor network.
Typosquats on criminal markets: No honor among thieves
The threat of typosquat domains on the dark web are significantly higher for these services because .onion domains are intentionally complex, often appearing as a long set of random characters; they’re called “hidden services” for a reason.
[...] we were able to aggregate and deduplicate all of these results and found over 350 unique .onion domains were being used to spoof “legitimate” dark web domains.
How cybercriminals profit from brand impersonation
The scammer claimed that they made off with a lot of money: 200 BTC, which is around $760,000 at the time of writing. That’s nothing to scoff at. If what the fraudster says is true, it proves how profitable brand impersonation and domain squatting can be.
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Scammers can monetize their typosquat domains in a variety of ways, including advertising through web traffic driven to the site, harvesting credentials to sell or reuse in other fraud attacks, or directly from purchases made on these sites with no actual product being delivered.
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mirimir · Mar 21, 2019

And it's worse with v3 onions: 56 characters plus ".onion".

If there's any sort of risk involved, you can't just trust onion URLs that you find online (in articles or link-farms, or via searching). You must find multiple independent citations, or get them from a trusted source. And it's always prudent to test.

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