On July 11, the Italian registry of the network managed by the Cnr opened to accents and foreign language characters. In essence it is about making domain names like papa.it, garcon.it o österreich.it. The rate of requests for registrations of this type immediately became very high. The numbers broke through the 100.000 mark on the first day of liberalization.
One of the first accents was to why.it, registered after just 3 seconds, then it was the turn of the wrong variant perché.it, followed by più, casino, papa, caffè and company, but also by words such as agentì, pizzà and ìtalià which actually do not include the accent in Italian.
The suspicion is that forwarding all these requests are not only the brand owners really interested in grabbing the domain name or the institutions and companies that finally see the recognized toponym or l 'exact writing of its company name. There is in fact a shadow that has always loomed over domain name registrations, that of typosquatting, evolved form of spam through the channel of Internet sites closely linked to the proliferation of computer viruses.
The technique has been around since almost the dawn of the Internet, but before that it was used for the simple purpose of mimicking a name. The famous casewhitehouse. com” in the United States which instead of directing to the home page of the White House led to a pornographic site. Today the idea is to cover all the most probable typo errors and prepare malicious software ready for download. A little inattention to the keyboard typing in the exact address of a site and you run the risk of ending up in one of these trap sites.
With the accent liberalization and some special characters, the possibilities for typosquatters are multiplied to no end. Previously, spammers did nothing but register domains such as cvorriere.it instead of courier.it to make unsuspecting surfers find familiar-looking pages that invited them to update their browsers, but were actually ready to inoculate virus o spyware. The ambush had been extended to other information sites (in some cases it is still present) such as republica.it which became republica.it or repubbglica.it or even repubbhlica.it and had not spared even Alitalia, Tiscali, Libero, e- bay, Trenitalia and even Google.
To register all these sites was always the same person: such Alexeys Boyarovs, residing in Germany. The company that kept the servers alive is also German (Prolat). In most cases, a glance was enough to realize that you had written "Gugul.it" instead of "Google.it", but with accents, how many people will be able to understand that they are on a site that is not actually the one required? Which of the two caffè.it or caffé.it is the right one?
The best way to defend yourself, if you really don't want to raise your attention level, is to add links to “favorites” after verifying that they are “authentic”.
