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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Cyberwire Research Saturday. I'm Dave Bittner,

and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts tracking down the threats and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard

problems and protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace. Thanks for joining us.

This came to our attention because we were basically visiting a website to check it out for research purposes, which we expected to be parked.

In other words, we expected it to just show that splash scene that we've all seen for decades that says,

this domain may be available for sale.

And instead, it was like a whip, whip, whip.

And suddenly you had a thing that said, there's a virus on your machine.

That's Dr. Renee Burton, Vice President of Info Blocks Threaten Tell.

The research we're discussing today is titled Parked Domains and Direct Search, an underreported security risk.

So we realized, wait a second, that's not parked, and then tried to understand, like, how large is this problem?

So can we just start with some basic stuff here?

I mean, when we talk about a parked domain, what do most people expect that to mean?

And what did your team find instead?

So a parked domain traditionally is for domain monetization.

There's a whole industry in this.

And certainly not one of those domain monetization experts,

but essentially they buy large numbers of

domains that are typos. There are natural things that you would, you know, in the classic

sense of park domains, they would buy, you know, one finger off type of whatever you were

going to type, Netflix.com. Instead, maybe that, you know, L would be a K or something.

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