The introduction of Internet addresses in non-Roman scripts could offer fresh opportunities to cyber-criminals, experts have warned.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will for the first time accept Internet domain names in non-Roman scripts.
The new internationalized domain names will open up the Internet as never before to users whose native language does not use the Roman alphabet. But Roman-reading users face a possible deluge of phishing and e-mail scams.
To a Roman-reading eye, an e-mail containing a link to any one of these sites might appear genuine, while to a Russian-reading eye, “paypal”, for example, reads as “raural”. An e-mail link could thus lead to a clone site constructed by unscrupulous thieves, who could then use it to harvest personal and financial details, or to steal cash.
At present, most e-mail phishing does not use anything that resembles the real site name. We could see the level of sophistication in phishing attacks increased by the use of foreign languages.
Tags: phishing