Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is the practice of registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with the bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. It's considered a form of brand impersonation and is a significant concern in cybersecurity.
The act of cybersquatting often involves registering a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a well-known brand or trademark. The intent behind this is typically to:
Sell the domain back to the trademark owner for a significant profit, a practice sometimes referred to as "domain hijacking" or "domain squatting."
Redirect traffic from the look-alike domain to a competitor's website or a malicious site.
Host phishing campaigns or other scams on the domain to deceive customers and steal sensitive information.
There are several variations of cybersquatting, including:
Typosquatting: Registering a domain name that is a common misspelling of a legitimate brand (e.g., gooogle.com instead of google.com). This takes advantage of users' typing errors.
Homoglyph attacks: Using characters that look visually similar to legitimate characters (e.g., using a Cyrillic 'а' instead of a Latin 'a') to create a deceptive domain.
Domain Name Permutations: Creating variations of a domain name by adding, removing, or changing characters, often to confuse users.
Cybersquatting is a legal and ethical issue, with many countries having laws like the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) in the United States to protect trademark owners. From a cybersecurity perspective, it's a key part of an organization's digital risk protection strategy to monitor for and defend against these malicious domains.
ThreatNG helps to address cybersquatting by providing a comprehensive solution that covers external discovery, assessment, reporting, continuous monitoring, and various investigation modules.
ThreatNG Capabilities for Addressing Cybersquatting
ThreatNG's external discovery is a foundational element, as it can perform unauthenticated discovery without connectors. This means it can find a company's external attack surface from an attacker’s perspective, which is crucial for identifying malicious look-alike domains. For example, ThreatNG can discover domain name permutations and other digital risks that a company might not be aware of.
The external assessment capabilities are central to identifying and scoring the risks associated with cybersquatting. ThreatNG's Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility assessment is particularly relevant. It uses external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including Domain Intelligence, to analyze a website's subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses to evaluate its susceptibility to subdomain takeover. Another key assessment is
Brand Damage Susceptibility, which is derived from a combination of attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, and Domain Intelligence, including Domain Name Permutations. By analyzing these factors, ThreatNG can determine how susceptible an organization is to brand impersonation via malicious domains.
ThreatNG's reporting capabilities would be essential for communicating these risks. The solution can generate various reports, including Executive, Technical, and Security Ratings reports, which can be used to inform stakeholders about the risks of cybersquatting and guide remediation efforts.
The platform offers continuous monitoring of external attack surfaces, digital risks, and security ratings for all organizations. This is critical for cybersquatting, as it ensures that new malicious domains and impersonation attempts are detected as soon as they appear, rather than during periodic scans.
Investigation Modules for Deeper Analysis
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules provide detailed tools to analyze potential cybersquatting threats. The
Domain Intelligence module is essential. It includes DNS Intelligence, which performs a deep analysis of domain records and identifies vendors and technologies. The Domain Name Permutations feature within this module is a direct countermeasure to cybersquatting. It detects and groups various manipulations of a domain, such as substitutions, additions, and homoglyphs. Providing mail records and IP addresses for taken domains helps organizations identify if a malicious domain is active.
For example, if an attacker registers g00gle.com (a substitution), ThreatNG's Domain Name Permutations feature would flag this as a potential threat. Furthermore, it could show the mail records and IP address associated with that domain, confirming its use and providing crucial information for a takedown request. ThreatNG also looks for "Authentication" and "Derogatory" terms in domain permutations, which could indicate phishing or brand disparagement.
Intelligence Repositories and Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's Intelligence Repositories, branded as DarCache, use continuously updated intelligence to help with cybersquatting. The DarCache Dark Web repository, for instance, provides information on an organization's presence on the dark web, which could include discussions about launching phishing campaigns using cybersquatted domains.
While ThreatNG provides a comprehensive solution for external attack surface management, it can work with complementary solutions to enhance its effectiveness. For example, the intelligence gathered by ThreatNG on a malicious domain, such as its IP address and DNS records, could be sent to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. The SIEM could then use this information to create rules that block traffic from that IP address, preventing employees or customers from accidentally visiting the malicious site.
Another example would be working with a Brand Protection Platform. ThreatNG could feed its findings on discovered domain name permutations directly to a brand protection platform, which could then use the information to automate legal takedown notices or monitor social media for brand impersonation, providing a more robust defense against digital risk. The
Continuous Monitoring of ThreatNG ensures these complementary solutions receive real-time updates on new threats.
