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.
Related News:
Nearly 3,000 smartcard phones infected - 3.19.2010
Nearly 3,000 memory cards in HTC Magic smartphones released by Vodafone were infected by malware before purchase, Vodafone Spain reported on Friday. The initial scare came last week when a researcher for Panda Security discovered the breach on her newly purhcased phone.
Google removes malware-spreading site from searches - 3.19.2010
Google announced on Friday that DealsDirect, Australia's largest discount estore, was temporarily blocked from direct access by users after the search engine detected malware on the site.
Facebook bigger threat to web security than Twitter - 3.19.2010
The amount of information available on a person's Facebook profile page makes the popular social networking site more dangerous than other popular competitors such as Twitter, according to AVG Technologies.
Web security professionals skeptical of national broadband - 3.18.2010
Leading web security experts believe that the recently released National Broadband Program is potentially a major risk to national web security. As more people move from dial-up and other slower forms of internet access, they will be exposed to malware and be unable to handle it.
Authorities call for increased URL regulation - 3.18.2010
In an effort to attack malware at the root of the problem, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency submitted a new list of recommendations to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that would make it more difficult to register a domain on the web, according to IT World Canada.
|
