• by Ray Schultz , November 17, 2020

Security firm CSC is urging consumers to beware of typographical errors in brand messaging during the holiday season. 

Misspelled words in email and other channels can denote online fraud, counterfeit goods and other cyber crime, the company says, based on its own online research. 

The company’s Digital Brand Services division says that 70% of 1,553 typos in registered domains purporting to be from 10 large online shopping brands can be attributed to third parties.

CSC notes that 37% of 100 most visited typo domains it studied were configured to send and receive email with MX records. In addition, 38% were used for advertising-related and pay-per-click web content.

But 27% had no live web content yet, and 15% conducted affiliate referrals. In addition, 12% pointed toward shopping-related web content, and 8% pointed toward malicious web content, or malware

These problems are exacerbated by the fact that only 16% of the top 500 global ecommerce domains use name system (DNS) hosting redundancy. 

And, 40% of retailers fail to deploy enterprise-class domain registrars — instead, 40% utilize retail registrars.