The "typosquat" thing has been pretty well known since about 1990, but seems to have made something of a comeback recently. While it's pretty easy to come up with variations on legitimate web addresses that might be frequently mistyped, in most cases there has to be a vulnerability, usually in your browser, that can be exploited to get malware on your machine when you open the "bad page."
Most of the recent attempts using this method have been aimed at exploits that only work with OS/browser combinations that are "less than current." There is some opinion that patches on IE and current Windows versions have made them sufficiently less vulnerable that the exploiters are falling back to attacks on older systems. There are still a lot of Win98 users around, and it's been "phased out" so the latest patches are only availabe for "really nasty" stuff. If the apparent current trend continues, it may become really difficult to keep your old machines - with old OS - safe to operate on the web.
The most damaging recent exploits tend to rely on expoiting the operating unit in front of the keyboard. There seems to be a real difficulty with programing that system to avoid malware consistently. There's a relatively new name for the problem. They're called "social exploit" methods.