Non-Latin URLs and data security

Hello!!! Today let’s speak about data security issues concerning non-Latin domain names.

Non-Latin characters in domain names help the Internet to serve the whole world, not just the English-speaking part of it. But on the other side, IDNs have also been known for the potential they create for security problems.

The most obvious form of abuse facilitated by IDNs is phishing. Completely foreign domains in non-latin characters may simply be confusing and fool some users just for that reason, but the real problem is that some characters in non-latin character sets are visually identical to latin characters.

With non-Latin characters appearing in domain names, it might not be so easy to tell where you are anymore. Below, we see an example of how the Cyrillic characters for “raural” can become “paypal”. If the domain appeared to be ‘paypal.com’, most people wouldn’t think twice about putting in their credit card number. And it is a real problem!!!