As commonly used a cousin domain is a domain name that is constructed in a way to fool victims into thinking it is a different, specific domain. This can be accomplished by deliberately misspelling the domain – for example, exampl3.com would be a misleading cousin domain for example.com. Fraudsters would register or gain control of exampl3.com and use it to send messages impersonating example.com, and busy or distracted users might not notice the “3” in place of the “e” and assume the message was legitimate, click on a link or open an attachment, and fall victim to the attack. In recent years it is increasingly common to see Unicode characters used to create more convincing cousin domains.

As commonly used a cousin domain is a domain name that is constructed in a way to fool victims into thinking it is a different, specific domain. This can be accomplished by deliberately misspelling the domain – for example, exampl3.com would be a misleading cousin domain for example.com. Fraudsters would register or gain control of exampl3.com and use it to send messages impersonating example.com, and busy or distracted users might not notice the “3” in place of the “e” and assume the message was legitimate, click on a link or open an attachment, and fall victim to the attack. In recent years it is increasingly common to see Unicode characters used to create more convincing cousin domains.