McAfee says that its report titled, "What's in a Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007," exposes how typo-squatters register domains using common misspellings of popular brands, products and people in order to redirect consumers to alternative websites. These squatter-run sites generate click-through advertising revenues, lure unsuspecting consumers into scams and harvest email addresses to flood users with unwanted email, says the company. To quantify the scope of the study, McAfee reviewed 1.9 million variations of 2,771 of the most popular domain names.

"Typo-squatting illustrates the Wild West mentality that remains dominant in major portions of the Internet," says Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs and product development. "Even at its most benign, this practice takes consumers to places they never intended and penalizes legitimate businesses by siphoning customers away or making them pay a charge to re-acquire customers. At its worst, typo-squatting leads to online scams, 'get-rich-quick' offers and other risks."

Some of the key findings from the report show that a typical consumer who misspells a popular URL has a one in 14 chance of landing at a typo-squatter site. Children's sites are heavily targeted with more than 60 percent of the most squatted sites designed to appeal to the 18-and-under demographic and some typo-squatters even take advantage of typing errors to expose children to pornography. The study also found that the five most highly squatted categories are game sites, airline sites, mainstream media sites, dating sites and technology and Web 2.0-related websites.

Last month, McAfee signed a definitive agreement to acquire ScanAlert for approximately $51 million in cash up front and with an earn-out of up to an additional $24 million if certain performance targets are met.