Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse
This addresses a security threat for internet users and organizations by exposing the prevalence and longevity of combosquatting abuse, though it is incremental as it builds on existing domain squatting research.
The study tackled the problem of combosquatting, a type of domain squatting, by analyzing over 468 billion DNS records over six years, finding that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains persist for over 1,000 days and activity is increasing yearly.
Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records---collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.