Phishing attacks using internationalized domains are hard to block

The latest version of Google Chrome, released earlier this week, restricts how domain names that use non-Latin characters are displayed in the browser. This change is in response to a recently disclosed technique that could allow attackers to create highly credible phishing websites.

The ability to register domain names made up of characters like those found in the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and other non-Latin alphabets dates back over a decade. Since 2009, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has also approved a large number of internationalized top-level domains (TLDs) — domain extensions — written with such characters.

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Network World Security