Websites that are made for the purpose of causing harm to the users via criminal or malicious purposes are called rogue websites. Rogue websites can cause harm in mainly 3 ways. Cybersquatting, Typosquatting, Counterfeit-selling websites. 

Cybersquatting

Cybersquatting means takeover of domain names to take advantage of trademarks belonging to someone else. Buying and selling is very easy at present times. Cybersquatters monitors recently expired domains and claims them before the original owners can claim them.

There are mainly 2 ways cybersquatters take advantage of this situation – 

1. Buying a domain before the trademark holder can claim them and then selling back to the trademark holder at a higher price
2. Deviate website traffic of potential buyers to other websites

Companies that are not too tech savvy or smaller companies fall prey to cybersquatting. 

Example: British pop singer Madonna’s website falls victim to cybersquatting

Typosquatting

Typosquatting is the practice of opening a new domain name that closely resembles a popular or well known brand. Typosquatters do this to gain traffic on the shoulders of popular brands. 

Typosquatters may just use typographical errors or typos and common spelling mistakes to make their domain look like a popular domain so that they gain more traffic and sell users counterfeit products or infect their devices with harmful malware or scam them.

Example: jenniferlopez.com was a victim of typosquatting with rogue websites jenniferlopez.net and jenniferlopez.org

Counterfeit-selling websites

Counterfeit-selling websites primarily try to persuade the targeted customers to make them think they are selling legit products from a legitimate website. 

While counterfeit-sellers try to make their rogue website look like they are selling official products or are associated with an official brand, that is not the case. When targeted customers reach the rogue website, they might be influenced to buy counterfeit products. 

Example: The curious case of fake Apple.com websites

How to identify rogue websites

1. Lacks basic information
2. Poorly built and bad layout
3. Keeps you from exiting your web browser
4. Persuade you to buy a rogue security tool 
5. Annoying number of pop-up advertisements
6. Offers to to provide free security checkup

Onsist helps taking down rogue websites

One of the best ways to counter Rogue Websites is to enlist the help of Online Anti-Piracy agencies such as Onsist. Onsist has been battling online piracy for the last decade. 

‘Stop Losing Your Revenue to Piracy’ has always been the motto of Onsist, using advanced automated tools to report and takedown illegal online videos such as popular movies or tv series, helping streamers to go back to the source of the contents. 

The vision of Onsist has always been to protect brands from all over the world against online theft and piracy. Onsist wants people not to fear losing their content to pirates, counterfeiters and other digital threats. 

Onsist finds and removes illegal copies of your content and protects your revenue with anti-piracy protection.

Find Infringements

Find pirated content in three ways

• Monitoring Engines

Anti-Piracy Engines that will crawl the web for infringements 24/7

• Piracy Database

A database of scraped piracy sites for easy content detection

• Trained Experts

Experts to manually reach places a bot cannot

Remove Them

Report and remove content when it’s found

• Send Out Notices

Illegal content is reported to the infringing sites

• Contact hosting

Hosting providers will be notified of infringements

• Clean up search engines

Google, Bing, and other search engines will be cleaned

Report The Results

Get notified of findings and removals

• Live Statistics

Get live feedback on found and reported infringements

• Detailed Results

Check out the status of each and every URL that’s found

• Weekly Reports

Receive weekly reports on what’s been found and removed