To err is human, and a significant minority of people trying to reach your website will demonstrate this by making a mistake. On average, 5% of address bar type-ins will contain a typographical error. Typosquatters exploit this phenomenon and hijack the intellectual property of companies by registering domain portfolios of these mutations. In a typical scenario the resulting traffic will be exposed to advertising through a domain parking service. These pages can often carry advertising for competitors. This is more than just an annoyance to brand owners and their customers, typosquatting means lost sales and brand dilution. Nobody is immune to this threat, and all it takes to become exposed is a little success.

The volume of traffic to your website will reflect the same life-cycle stages as any brand or product: Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. Typosquatting activity typically follows a pattern within this framework.
Development. For companies with a track record of launching high traffic websites, the threat can start at an embryonic stage. Your new domain name can be exposed within 24 hours of registration. Online domain tools offer subscribers the ability to monitor your name server activity and scan new whois records for your details.
Growth. Once your site has launched, your traffic volume will soon reach the threshold at which your name will be detected by typosquatters and targeted for profitable mutations. From here on, typosquatters will be competing with one another over your domains. The abusive registrations commonly start within the first few months after launch, and activity is often at its highest during the growth stage.
Maturity. When growth levels out, typosquatting activity can continue for some considerable time. Eventually the opportunities will become exhausted and the typosquatters will mostly lose interest.

To make matters worse, the issues now go beyond the activity of typosquatters, even beyond domains that have been registered at all. Internet service providers have begun to cash in by redirecting type-ins for unregistered domains, a controversial practice tantamount to catch-all typosquatting. The traffic is normally redirected to pages of sponsored search results that are displayed according to the character string of the URL entered.

If you want to win these domains back, the first thing to try is to send a cease and desist letter. Failing that, the options are limited. Filing a lawsuit under the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) is expensive, painstaking, and lengthy. Recovering these names though the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) can be faster and cheaper, however given a real-world typosquatter problem, recovering all the domains can present an impossible challenge. The ideal problem scenario would be that a single typosquatter had registered all of your mutations at once. In reality though, the problem can take years to develop. This means that traffic is lost to the typosquatter while he builds up a portfolio worthy of a UDRP complaint. A successful UDRP complaint cannot reclaim lost revenue, only the source of the traffic. Furthermore, it's unlikely to be a solitary typosquatter. Your domains can be held by upwards of ten individuals, making it impractical to pursue all of them. This means that while you can win back some of the higher traffic names, the best you're likely to achieve is a partial solution to the problem.