Typos hurt! Never Goggle!

Sadly, malware writers prey on our mistakes. In fact, they depend on them for their financial gain. This trickery has been going on since the early days of the web. One of the most famous nasty tricks was the website Whitehouse[.]com. (The legitimate government site is Whitehouse.gov. Learn more about this trick at Wikipedia.) It may be hard to understand how these tricks profit the cybercriminals. Some of the profit may come from generating traffic for a website (penny per click). This trick is called “web trapping” and was very successfully employed in the early days of the web by John Zuccarini until he successfully targeted children and tricked them into visiting porn sites. That was against the law and thankfully he was arrested and sent to jail. Learn more about the Zuccarini case:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2463
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zuccarini
http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/FTC_v._Zuccarini

Unfortunately, the laws of the United States do not apply to websites that are hosted outside the U.S. A WHOIS look up of the domain Goggle[.]com shows that the owner is hiding behind a privacy service called WhoisGuard.  The website is registered in Panama and thus United States laws do not apply. The risks for misspelling “Google” are much greater than exposing unwitting children to pornography. Mistyping Google in an address bar of a web browser so it comes out as “Goggle[.]com” can be a deadly mistake for computer owners. Goggle[.]com is a VERY malicious website.  In 2011, Google tried to sue the owner of Goggle in court but lost the case (see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/12/google_v_goggle/) The Zulu Online Risk Analyzer and Sucuri.net describes the site as 100% malicious on October 25, 2019 for a variety of reasons including the existence of malware:

Here is a video posted in January, 2018 on YouTube showing what happens to a Windows user when he accidentally types Goggle.com instead of Google.com:

Bottom line: Goggle[.]com is a MAJOR malware installer. The site has “drive-by downloads” that immediately cause a computer infection unless you are well protected. Goggle[.]com was created specifically to take advantage of a simple typo.

Moral of this story….. TYPE carefully! Google, don’t Goggle.