CYBR650-T302
Week-6

Threat of Unicode Domain Spoofing Fix Addressed For Chrome

On Wednesday April 19, 2017 Google released Chrome 58 to help address 29 known vulnerabilities. One of these vulnerabilities was known as “Unicode Domain Phishing”. The issue resides in Unicode characters in hostnames through what is called Punycode. Punycode can take characters and change them in a way to allow a hacker to spoof legitimate websites for the purpose of phishing attacks.  According to the Security week article by Ionut Arghire “The issue was also demonstrated by Avanan researchers in December 2016, when they stumbled upon live phishing attacks targeting Office 365 business email users. Using Unicode characters, attackers could create a site looking like http://www.pаypal.com/, but which actually resolved to http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com/, thus bypassing Office 365’ anti-phishing defenses, the researchers explained.” (Arghire, 2017) 

References

Arghire, I. (2017, April 20). Chrome Addresses Threat of Unicode Domain Spoofing. Retrieved from Security Week: http://www.securityweek.com/chrome-addresses-threat-unicode-domain-spoofing