Are Non-Latin Alphabet Domain Names a Phishing Threat?

Posted 01/04/2010 at 5:26pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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In a recent move ICANN decided it would be just fine if domain names used non-Latin characters. Since the inception of online domain names, all addresses had to be in the Latin characters most of us are familiar with (and that you are currently reading).  The ICANN decision will mean addresses could use, for example, Russian Cyrillic or Asian characters. While this seems all well and good on the surface, there’s a problem lurking. It could let the bad guys run more effective phishing schemes.

A unicode font supports multiple languages simultaneously and can be a real help, but display a Cyrillic word in a Unicode font, and it may look completely different. It may even appear to be an English word. If you expect to be on a certain domain, you used to be able to just check the domain name. Did you expect to be on ‘amazon.com’, but instead the domain is ‘secret-hacker-site.com’? You might want to hightail it out of there.

With non-Latin characters about to start popping up in domain names, it might not be so easy to tell where you are anymore. Below, we see an example of how the Cyrillic characters for “raural” can become “paypal”. If the domain appeared to be ‘paypal.com’, most people wouldn’t think twice about putting in their credit card number. A little concerning? Yeah, we thought so.

Image via Gizmodo