Different types of hijacking
Most of the domain hijacking today can be divided into three major categories; cybersquatting, typosquatting and reverse domain hijacking.
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is the modern way of “settling on unoccupied land without legal claim”. Some companies may not at first realize how important the Internet can be when it comes to reaching out to new customers. These so called cybersquatters simply exploit the first-come, first-served nature of the domain name registration system by registers domain names that include other companies’ trademarks. That way they are able to catch all the traffic from people trying to find out more about that trademark.
The cybersquatters then tries to sell the domain name to the trademark owner at a much higher price than the registration costs. In some cases this can almost be seen as extortion since the cybersquatters have full control of the domain name and that way they can decide what the visitors sees when they try to reach the homepage of the trademark. It is an easy task to redirect all traffic to a competitor’s homepage or a page containing material that the company does not want to be associated with. This way they can more or less force the company to buy the domain from them. There can also be other benefits from registering trademarked domain names which will be discussed when we come to monetizing domains.
Typosquatting
Each and every day Internet users are making millions of typos, typographical errors, when entering domain names in their web browsers. In this case the typosquatters first look for websites that have a lot of visitors and then they register typos of those websites’ domain names. That way people will not get the standard error message, saying that the page could not be found, when they accidentally do a typo while typing the address. Instead they will come to the typosquatter’s website.
There are mainly four kinds of domain names that the typosquatters will look for. The different kinds will be explained using the domain name mortgage.com as an example.
- A common misspelling, (mortage.com)
- A misspelling based on typing errors (motrgage.com)
- A differently phrased domain name (mortgages.com)
- A different top-level (mortgage.net)
Reverse domain hijacking
There is also something called reverse domain hijacking where companies send so called “cease and desist” letters to domain owners. These letters are a lawyer’s way of saying “Stop using this domain name, or else…”.
The company simply threatens the domain owner by saying that he/she is violating their trademark and if he/she does not either cancel the domain or sign an owner transfer paper, they will take legal actions which will involve costs. It is a simple way to scare away private persons or smaller companies that most likely do not know what legal rights they have.