Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scammers Abuse Multilingual Domain Names (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the beware dept.

Cyber-criminals are abusing multilingual character sets to trick people into visiting phishing websites. BBC: The non-English characters allow scammers to create "lookalike" sites with domain names almost indistinguishable from legitimate ones. Farsight Security found scam sites posing as banks, loan advisers and children's brands Lego and Haribo. Smartphone users are at greater risk as small screens make lookalikes even harder to spot. The Farsight Security report looked at more than 100 million domain names that use non-English character sets -- introduced to make the net more familiar and usable for non-English speaking nations -- and found about 27% of them had been created by scammers. It also uncovered more than 8,000 separate characters that could be abused to confuse people.

Farsight founder Paul Vixie, who wrote much of the software underpinning the net's domain names told the BBC: "Any lower case letter can be represented by as many as 40 different variations."

4 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Unicode is a mess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Saw this coming years ago. Unicode assignment is a god awful mess, made worst now that nearly every single noun has an emoji version. Pity that we're probably stuck with it until the end of humanity.

    1. Re:Unicode is a mess by Calydor · · Score: 5, Informative

      slashdot.org and sIashdot.org can be hard to tell apart.

      I actually had to copy that into Notepad to see what you did. Well played.

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
  2. It's not unicode - DNS uses punycode by FeelGood314 · · Score: 5, Informative

    DNS entries are ASCII. Punycode is a way to put unicode in ASCII in a way that is sort of mostly human readable. For an English speaker (AKA ASCII character users) always set your browser to display the raw punycode and not the unicode points. For the less technical but still English speaking you should be fine as long as you only visit sites with HTTPS. No reputable CA should be signing EV certs with punycode that looks like English words. Ones that do will quickly be removed from the browsers.

    For the non-English, you're f#@ked. Seriously. This was a good awful idea. We are going to return to an English only internet because everything else will be untrustable.

  3. Re:Unicode doesn't belong in a URL... by darkain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They were thinking that not the entire world is English speaking.