ICANN international domain names could boost phishing gangs
Friday, October 30, 2009
ICANN, the body responsible for regulating the domain name system (DNS) for web addresses, plans to move ahead with international domain names using non-Latin alphabets, but a report by security researchers suggests this could help phishing gangs launch new attacks.
Although many countries are celebrating the move to web addresses using characters from their native languages, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported this month that non-Latin characters could help phishers spoof legitimate websites with similar characters.
For example, a phishing website set up to mimic the online payment website paypal.com could use a Cyrillic "a" instead of an ASCII "a," making it a technically different web address but similar enough to fool users.
So far at least, phishers have not been using such tricks at a high frequency, but the proliferation of new international web addresses could present the opportunity.
The report said phishing gangs may not actually need to use such tactics to successfully pull off their scams. Through June 2009, only 85 international domain names had been used for phishing.
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