Homograph Attacks using Homoglyphs

Homograph attacks are the latest in a long line of new attack vectors now being used by cybercriminals to trick users into disclosing personal information such as passwords or other sensitive data.

A Homograph is an attack that uses homoglyphs, characters that use other character sets such as Greek and Cyrillic that have letters that look the same as the roman equivalents. As such, cybercriminals can register domain names that look on the surface to be identical to existing domains and can be used to capture user passwords or other sensitive information. A good example would be an attacker registering the domain “google.com” but using the unicode character u+043E or cyrillic small letter O. There are many characters this can be applied to in order to create a significant number of identical domains.

This technique is usually combined with phishing attacks to trick the user into clicking on the domain and redirecting them to an untrusted domain to deploy malware or collect other information.

BlackFog Privacy provides automatic protection from homographs and homoglyphs by monitoring network packets in real time. When it detects domains containing multiple character sets it automatically prevents access to that domain.