The Microsoft Edge team has announced that they have increased their phishing and fraud protections by partnering with the Microsoft Bing Indexing team on website typo protection. This partnership enables them to constantly scour the web for new “typosquatters” (the bad actors who target these small errors) and dynamically update Microsoft Edge, thus protecting users against newly identified “typosquatting” sites as soon as they are discovered.
It’s easy to make typos when writing out a website name (URL), but these simple mistakes can lead you to potentially fraudulent websites planted by malicious actors. Website typo protection helps protect you when you accidentally navigate to a fraudulent site after misspelling a well-known site’s URL by guiding you to land on the legitimate site instead.
When encountering a typosquatting site that has been have identified, you’ll be greeted with an interstitial warning page suggesting you might have misspelled the site you’re navigating to and asking you to verify the site address before proceeding. Enterprise customers can configure website typo protection through the TyposquattingCheckerEnabled policy.
Microsoft Defender SmartScreen helps protect users against websites that engage in phishing and malware campaigns and website typo protection complements the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen service to defend against web threats. All these features are included for free in the Edge browser and Windows 11.
