Homograph Attack (Internationalized Domain Name Spoofing)
A visual deception technique where attackers use characters from different alphabets that look identical to Latin characters to spoof trusted domains.
Overview
A Homograph Attack exploits the fact that many characters in international alphabets (like Cyrillic, Greek, or Latin) look exactly the same to the human eye. For instance, an attacker might register 'apple.com' using the Cyrillic 'а'. To the victim, the URL looks 100% legitimate, but it directs them to a credential harvesting site. PhiShark's advanced validation engine performs deep lexical analysis and visual character mapping, instantly identifying these imperceptible anomalies and blocking the spoofed domain before the user can interact with it.
Real-World Examples
- ▸Using a Cyrillic 'о' in microsoft.com
- ▸Exploiting Punycode to hide malicious Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
- ▸Bypassing human visual inspection in spear-phishing links
Related Terms
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