Tech Tip Tuesday – Homograph Attacks

This is straight out of Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

“The internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack is a way a malicious party may deceive computer users about what remote system they are communicating with, by exploiting the fact that many different characters look alike, (i.e., they are homographs, hence the term for the attack). For example, a person frequenting citibank.com may be lured to click a link in which the Latin C is replaced with the Cyrillic С.”

This vulnerability coupled with convincing phishing campaign could easily dupe the savviest of users. Bad guys/gals can make it even more convincing by getting valid certificates for their domain. Chrome 59 is patched and Firefox has a workaround by not providing a user friendly way of reading IDNs. https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/

If you have a Tech Tip you want to share, send them to info@cyberhui.org and we'll get them out next #TechTipTuesday.