VentureBeat

Bad hackers haven’t caused much damage this year during the online-heavy presidential campaign. But the potential is there. Consider “typosquatting.”

There are about 160 different ways to type in the wrong web site for www.barackobama.com. Oliver Friedrichs, former director of research at Symantec, knows this because he did a study of the sites that typo squat, or exploit users’ misspellings of web site names to siphon off traffic from the official candidate’s web site for a variety of commercial or corrupt purposes.

At Black Hat today, Friedrichs described the typosquatting study as part of a broader talk offering a warning about how any big election could be threatened by a variety of different cyber attacks. The talk is partially chronicled in a chapter that he wrote for Crimeware, a new book published by Symantec Press. Typosquatting, while interesting, is one of the smaller cyber threats. Some of the more serious ones could actually undermine confidence of voters and skew election results. Fortunately, Friedrichs said, there hasn’t been a lot of use of the worst tactics yet in the current U.S. presidential campaign.

Friedrichs said that the candidates of the previous 2004 campaign raised considerable amounts of money online: John Kerry raised $82 million, while George Bush raised $14 million. This time, Obama has raised $350 million, with about 80 percent to 90 percent coming from online fundraising. About 45 percent of Democratic donors get email updates from the Obama campaign and 70 percent forward those emails. That represents a growing target for hacker attacks.

Legally, typosquatters are on thin ice. The actress Julia Roberts was able to get her domain name back from a squatter after the Internet authority ICANN ruled in her favor. Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, lost his case because www.sting.com is a fairly generic name.

In March 2007, Friedrichs said that 17 presidential candidates had dot com sites. Typosquatters such as www.narackobama.com had reserved 52 of the 160 possible typo sites related to misspelling Obama’s name. Typosquatters also occupied the domain names of 58 of 191 Hillary Clinton typo sites.

By February 2008, there were 79 Clinton typo sites and 47 Obama typo sites. The funny thing, Friedrichs said, was that the Obama campaign was taking ads out on one of the typo sites, www.barackobams.com, even though it legally could have owned the typo site itself based on the law and regulations.

In July of last year, Friedrichs registered 124 of the typo sites himself to protect against typosquatting and to conduct his own research. He said he got as many as 8,000 visitors a month to the sites. Some of the traffic came from adware programs.

The problem of typo domains is that hackers can steal money that people donate, since they wind up typing their credit card numbers into faux donation pages.

Here’s the latest action:

Another long time Yahoo employee departs — Jeremy Zawodny, a programmer who had been with the company since 1999, is moving on to a unnamed smaller company. Zawodny helped launch the Yahoo Developer Network and worked on several internal projects for the company. In his blog post on the topic, Zawodny points out that his departure is completely unrelated to the failed Microsoft takeover and now the Carl Icahn takeover bid. He follows other old-school Yahoo employees such as Bradley Horowitz out the door (Horowitz went to Google).

Did Loopt beat out Whrrl for Apple WWDC keynote placement? — A May BusinessWeek article insinuated that Whrrl might be one of the 3rd party iPhone apps showcased at the WWDC keynote. Instead, a competing location-based service (LBS) app, Loopt, was. Whrrl, created by Pelago, was the first app to be accepted into Kleiner Perkins’ iFund program, which is giving out $100 million to 3rd party iPhone app developers. Snub or oversight?

Google Street View turns one, adds a ton of cities — The controversial and borderline voyeuristic site has rolled out the service in 37 new areas. Find the full list on their blog post, and also note that a number of national parks are now included in the project.

Virgin Galactic rolls out the mothership, no really — The new aircraft, called WhiteKnightTwo, is designed to haul the passenger-filled SpaceShipTwo to its orbital altitude of 50,000 feet, according to USA Today. Billionaire Richard Branson is the “Spaceliner chief” of Virgin Galactic. In other billionaires in space news, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a $5 million investment in Space Adventures, a company that will take two passengers up to the International Space Station in 2011 — expect Brin to be one of them.

Microsoft can’t buy Facebook, so it has built its own Facebook — Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but it is interesting that the software giant, which owns a small percentage of the social network, has now built and is testing a network that is described as “Facebook-like,” according to InfoWorld. The project is called TownSquare, and is already in use by around 8,000 Microsoft employees.

Sirius-XM merger faces hold up in Washington — A new letter being requested by the Senate indicates that the two satellite radio companies have not complied with the FCC requirements that their receivers be interoperable, according to the Wall Street Journal. Such an omission could stall, or kill, the deal.

Symantec buys SwapDrive — The deal, signed last week, is said to be for $123 million, according to TechCrunch. SwapDrive competes in the online storage space with AOL’s Xdrive and Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive, and there is always rumor that Google will enter the space as well.

Cella Irvine is named chief executive of the About Group — The About Group runs the popular website About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Co.

Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) cuts forcast for growth — The chip giant says sales will slow in 2008 due to price pressure from the memory sector.

A Korean blog fuels a massive protest — You have to go to this site to see the picture, it’s crazy.

Daughter of well-known valley VC Tim Draper, has a new valley show coming — The show, called Valley Girl, will be about innovation in Silicon Valley. It will debut next month with interviews with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. Jesse Draper is one of the stars of the hit Nickelodeon show, Naked Brothers Band.

Wall Tetris at MindTribe — The Palo Alto-based company has a really cool interactive game on one of its walls that passers by can play with their cell phones.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you may want to avoid the Web 2.0 area, which is littered now with unpromising me-too ideas. You may want to consider something less sexy — data security, for example.

Vontu, a six-year-old Silicon Valley (Cupertino, Calif.) company which makes software to avoid data loss, said it has been acquired by Symantec, the maker of Norton security software, for a cool $350 million. That’s ten times the amount invested in Vontu by venture capitalists, meaning that management and investors both saw a nice profit.

Symantec said it plans to use Vontu to help customers prevent the loss of confidential information wherever it is stored.

There are lots of companies doing something similar to Vontu, but they all seem to have done well. There’s Oakley Networks (which was bought by Raytheon for $193 million), Port Authority (bought by Websense for $90 million), and others that are still private, including Tablus, Reconnex and Vericept.

Investors in Vontu include Venrock and Benchmark Capital, which had the lion’s share because of early investments, followed by U.S. Venture Partners and General Motors Asset Management.

This is a win by Benchmark partner David Beirne, who tried to hit big during the Internet boom with bets on companies like WebVan. WebVan, of course, was sexy, but was a notoriously bad investment, soaking up more than $1 billion in invetor’s money before going out of business. Vontu, on the other hand, is an example of how patience — over many years of toiling — can lead to solid, robust results. Benchmark first invested in 2002, after the hype of the bubble was long gone.

Vontu said it is close to profitability and expects to make $43 million in revenue this year.