Network Security

Malicious Reddit ‘twin’ discovered

The internet now has two front pages, but one is a fake created as a typosquatter to scam Reddit fans or as phishing bait.

The site uses the address www.reddit[.]co, note the missing “m”, and has been properly registered since 2010, reported Sophos' Naked Security. For most of its life the site has hosted a variety of unseemly pieces of content, such as Flash games and a porn cam, trying to interest anyone who miss typed Reddit's correct URL.

However, Alec Muffett, a principle engineer with Deliveroo recently noticed the page was now disguised as Redditt's homepage and described the doppelganger as a pitch perfect recreation. This was done, he believes, to use the page as part of some type of phishing scam. The site flagged as dangerous by Chrome and Firefox.

The URL is functional, despite not fully spelling .com, because .co is the Top Line Domain for the nation of Columbia. Muffett found the URL was registered in the Ukraine.

The fake Reddit version did allow people to attempt to log on, but any users who had been fooled and gave the forged site their real Reddit username and password and had enabled Reddit's recently instituted two-factor authentication would be protected, Sophos noted.

SC Media contacted Reddit for comment on the fake site, but has not yet received a reply.

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