Reαd carefully: how to spot – and avoid – a homoglyph attack
Source: The Guardian ·
Scam emails are increasingly using psychological tricks, such as using near-identical URLs like miсrosoft.comYou’ve read the email carefully and it looks legitimate. The link it asks you to click on has none of the usual red flags: there are no weird numbers or extra parts to the URL. You feel safe to proceed.But if you had looked slightly closer you may have noticed something slightly wrong…
From the source
You’ve read the email carefully and it looks legitimate. The link it asks you to click on has none of the usual red flags: there are no weird numbers or extra parts to the URL. You feel safe to proceed. But if you had looked slightly closer you may have noticed something slightly wrong with one of the characters. Just as in the headline of this piece where instead of “a” we used the Cyrillic “α”. Fraudsters can use letters from different alphabets to create URLs and email addresses that look almost identical to the real thing, but in reality send anyone who clicks on them to a spoof website or inbox. From there they can harvest personal details to use in their scams. There are other letters and symbols that are easily switched. Last year tech experts spotted fraudsters using the Japanese hiragana character ん to look like a / in an address designed to look as though it was on Booking.com’s website. Jake Moore, global security adviser at cybersecurity company ESET, says the fraudsters…