Microsoft Corp. has filed three lawsuits against "cybersquatters," in an effort to fight back against a surge of online trademark infringement by people seeking profit from pay-per-click advertising, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Cybersquatters and typosquatters -- people who register Web addresses either with trademarked terms or with common misspellings in the hopes of luring Web surfers who mistype addresses into their browsers -- are now registering more than 2,000 domains each day targeting Microsoft, said the software giant.

The vast majority of the sites, which have addresses like "microsoftrebate.com," "xbox36com.com" and "msnfinance.com," are bought by professional domain operations that place nothing on the pages but pay-per-click ads served by online-ad networks, Microsoft said.

About a quarter of the sites use privacy services to disguise their identities, it added.

In response, Microsoft has filed three civil lawsuits against defendants it said are profiting from domain names that infringe on Microsoft trademarks, according to the report.

"Microsoft has witnessed a virtual land rush for Internet domain names with the goal of driving traffic for profit," Aaron Kornblum, the company's Internet Safety Enforcement attorney, was quoted as saying.