Browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera are vulnerable to a new variation of an older attack that allows phishers to register and pass fake domains as the websites of legitimate services, such as Apple, Google, eBay, and others.
Discovered by Chinese security researcher Xudong Zheng, this is a variation of a homograph attack, first identified by Israeli researchers Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher, and known since 2001.
A homograph attack
A few years back, ICANN voted to allow non-ASCII (Unicode) characters in web domains. Because some Unicode characters look the same, such as Cyrillic "?" (U+0430) and Latin "a" (U+0041), ICANN ruled that using Unicode characters would have led to confusions, and made it harder to distinguish legitimate domains from phishing sites.
Full Article
