It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s typo protection on Microsoft Edge! Redmond has made available its newest security feature designed to make users of its web browser more safe and secure.
Website typo protection is now live for Edge.
Yes, you heard it right. This feature works exactly what it says on the tin.
This is a problem that many developers have ignored for way too long, and has likely resulted in hundreds of million dollars in losses over the years. It still remains one of the most used ways for cybercriminals to trap their victims.
Malicious actors make use of URL typos in their nefarious practices to either redirect unsuspecting users to their compromised sites or deploy infected payloads on their devices.
The concept is simply enough to understand. Every once in a while, when typing a web address in the address bar of a web browser, a user may input text with typos that are hard to notice at first glance. Doing so results in the browser pointing us to a completely different website or web resource.
Typosquatting, it is called.
Which is why this new feature that Microsoft has developed automatically detects these typos and prevents users from being redirected to malicious URLs.
As the company puts it:
“Website typo protection complements the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen service to defend against web threats. Microsoft Defender SmartScreen helps protect users against websites that engage in phishing and malware campaigns.
Typosquatters engage in phishing activities too, but there are only so many ways in which one can mistype a brand. Malicious actors know this and choose to host less aggravating content on “typosquat” URLs to avoid detection. Typosquatting site owners profit on users’ mistakes by taking them to advertising sites, affiliate links, false products, fake search engine results, or in some cases by redirecting users into parked domains reserved for very short-lived phishing campaigns.”
This new feature is as straightforward as you expect, and works very smoothly.
Every time you type an address in the URL bar, Edge performs an automatic check in the background to figure out if you are being targeted by typosquatting or not. It that is the case, the browser displays a message to let you know that there might be a typo in the URL your just entered.
This new addition is now enabled by default on all platforms where Microsoft Edge is available.
