How are hackers using Unicode domains for spoofing attacks?

Trust is a necessity in cybersecurity, and it's one of the main reasons attackers continually try to exploit this emotion when assaulting networks.

We put a lot of time and defensive effort into verifying that a particular party on the internet is who they say they are, and we do this with good reason. But because of this need for trust, attackers rely on spoofing as a standard method of exploitation. The more an attacker can deceive someone, the higher his probability of success, or cover, while attempting an exploit.

Here is where the recent proof of concept that shows attackers can abuse Unicode domains to look like legitimate sites comes into play. Attackers are able to trick users into clicking on particular links that look like they are from legitimate domains, but that actually lead to malicious sites.

This deception works because many letters look very similar within Unicode domains, especially within Latin and Cyrillic character sets. There is no distinguishable difference between many of these letters to the human eye, but computers treat them differently, and attackers use this to their advantage. Read my article below:

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/answer/How-are-hackers-using-Unicode-domains-for-spoofing-attacks