No more than three days after the widely-publicized death of George Floyd–which sparked waves of protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter–a large number of domains related to that name were monitored in the DNS.
Jonathan Zhang, CEO of WhoisXMLAPI reports on CircleID.com that the sudden upsurge in domain registrations related to “georgefloyd” and “blacklivesmatter” was also matched by an upsurge in closely-named domains, containing fragments such as “eorge” or “ivesmatt”. In many cases, these domains have Whois privacy enabled.
While this phenomenon is far from new, it does cast a renewed light on what is called “typosquatting”, a trend where domains similar to a popular name or phrase are registered very quickly. Some of these names are simply sat on, but others are often parlayed into business email compromise (BEC) or phishing scams. As such, it is important for internet users to be aware and vigilant for oddly-spelled names or phrases in unsolicited emails, as they are likely attempting one such scam.
