While trying to catch up with a huge backlog of recent email and potential blog topics, I came across this article that Graham Cluley posted a few days ago on Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) homograph attacks, the kind of spoofing attack where a site address looks legitimate but is not what it seems because a character or characters has been substituted deceptively (a technique very commonly used in phishing).
The example central to Graham’s article is the work of security researcher Paul Moore, who registered the domain IIoydsbank.co.uk and then invited Twitter users to spot the difference. Just to make things more interesting, Moore bought a TLS certificate from Cloudflare for his site so that it showed the green padlock that is meant to reassure us that all is secure.
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