This Site Is A Cousin Domain
To understand this site, we first need to talk about cousin domains. Simply put, a cousin domain is similar to another, usually more popular, pre-existing domain.
Mis-Spellings
Let's take a look at a couple examples using popular websites:
pre-existing domain: google.com
cousin domain: gogle.com
pre-existing domain: reddit.com
cousin domain: redddit.com
"But wait", you say, "these are all just mis-spellings of popular sites..." You're right! Good job noticing that.
Unicode: More Than Just Emojis
Updates to Unicode have brought us support for more languages and our beloved emoji 🤓. Unfortunately, another common tactic with cousin domains is using characters from other languages that look similar to the original domain's characters. We'll reuse our popular domains from earlier.
pre-existing domain: google.com
cousin domain: googlе.com
pre-existing domain: reddit.com
cousin domain: reԁԁit.com
Depending on your system's font preferences, these may be more or less convincing. A fun exercise is to look at these on mobile and see if you can spot the difference!
This variant of cousin domains is also called an IDN (international domain name) homograph attack. The internet has been working out how to handle these over the last few years. If you're into security, it's a fun wiki-walk rabbit hole to disappear into.
Why This Site Exists
Cousin Domains are often used cyber attacks of some sort to perpetuate fraud. This particular cousin domain came about due to simple human error.
My team often needs to log on to Fortinet's FortiCloud service to manage the hardware and services of our clients. Unfortunately, typos happen to the best of us, and we often find ourselves missing the 't' in forticloud.com. Especially pre-Redbull or pre-coffee 🪫.
When I realized this domain hadn't yet been registered, I registered it as a precaution since we often typoed it.
Acknowledgements
Fortinet, and Forticloud belong to Fortinet. Thanks for making the best (in my opinion) security solutions in the industry (I'm a little biased!)
This site reflects my personal opinion, and not the opinion of my employer.
Thanks to the folks who helped me up the ladder. <3