Homograph Phishing Attack Emerges Again

A conventional phishing method is hitting the news even as it potentially dupes certain Web-surfers irrespective of the number of times they examine one particular web-address for typos.

This is how phishing works: Someone dispatches an e-mail to many people asking for downloading a given attachment or clicking an embedded web-link. The phisher dispatches the web-link while surfing on certain URL which has some clever typo like having yhaoo.com rather than the actual yahoo.com. However, in the aforementioned phishing method known as homograph attack, the phisher dispatches one electronic mail while being on a URL, which appears almost same as the actual URL, substituting a few of the characters by likewise ones out of remaining alphabets.

Now, in spite of seeing all the safe signals on the screen, a Web-surfer can be phished. For e.g. an e-mail recipient follows a given web-link to land on https://appe.com when his Web-browser displays the padlock symbol colored green, indicating the website is secure as also the word "Secure" comes up beside the symbol giving additional reassurance.

The reason why he's still phished is because the URL might appear to read "apple," however, those characters are Cyrillic as A, Er, Er, Palochka, le. Actually the real certification confirming security appears; however, it merely substantiates about the user connecting safely to the URL but doesn't substantiate if the URL has connected with an authentic website. Theguardian.com posted this, April 19, 2017.

The problem can happen on most browsers like Chrome, Firefox or many not so popular browsers although not on Internet Explorer or Safari. And while the usual Web-addresses apparently can't just be recognized differently from the harmful URLs, it's yet relatively easy to stay away from the problem.

Thus for an incoming e-mail that the recipient isn't sure of, while it directs him to follow certain web-link, he shouldn't click on that web-link. Instead, he should type it inside any search engine or address bar of a browser. That's sure to land him on the actual genuine site. Effectively, with one password manager, an Internaut can spot phishing assaults prior to clicking any web-links.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/25/2017