Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)


A typo is one of those common mistakes with unpredictable results when it comes to the Internet’s domain names (DNS). In this blog post we’re going to analyze traffic for exmaple.com, and see how a very simple human error ends up creating unintentional traffic on the Internet.
Cloudflare has owned exmaple.com for a few years now, but don’t confuse it with example.com! example.com is a reserved domain name set by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has been used since 1999 as a placeholder, or example, in documentation, tutorials, sample network configurations, or to prevent accidental references to real websites. We use it extensively on this blog.
As I’m writing it, the autocorrect system transforms exmaple.com into example.com, every time, assuming I must have misspelled it. But in situations where there’s no automatic spelling correction (for example, while editing a configuration file) it’s easy for example to become exmaple.
And so, lots of traffic goes to exmaple.com by mistake — whether it was a typoed attempt to reach example.com or due to other random reasons. Fake email accounts in Continue reading