Tag: cybersecurity
Published on: 10 Dec 2025
Your browser swears it’s showing you “netflix.com”. Your eyes agree. Reality? You just handed your credentials to a server in Eastern Europe because one tiny letter was wearing a fake passport. Buckle up – this is homograph attacks, Part 1.
Look, we’ve all been there: bleary-eyed, thumb hovering over a link that swears it’s from “apple.com” or “paypal.com”. Click. Login. Wake up poorer.
The twist? That innocent-looking “a” was actually a Cyrillic impostor doing the cyber-equivalent of turning up to your house in a you-shaped mask.
Say hello to homograph attacks, the oldest trick in the evil-twin playbook.
The Unicode Fancy-Dress Disaster
Unicode is a beautiful thing. It lets us write “résumé” without looking like cavemen and sprinkle little 🌮 emojis everywhere.
It also gave scammers a dressing-up box with thousands of letters that look identical but are secretly from different alphabets.
The greatest hits of visual chaos:
- Latin a vs Cyrillic а → same curvy bottom, zero family relation
- Latin o vs Greek omicron ο → literally the same doughnut, different bakery
- The eternal ménage à trois: lowercase l, uppercase I, and the number 1 (they’ve been trolling us since Windows 95)
Combine a few of these body-doubles and аррӏе.com is born. To your eyes (and most fonts) it’s identical to apple.com. To the internet? Totally different address, probably registered yesterday in a basement in Narnia.
Punycode: The Internet’s Bad Hairpiece
The internet’s plumbing only understands boring old ASCII, so every pretty international domain gets translated into something that starts with xn—.
Your browser sees аррӏе.com, thinks “aw, cute”, and helpfully shows you the nice version while quietly sending you to xn—80ak6aa92e.com (actual server owned by someone called “YourMoneyMyProblem”).
Old security filters just shrug: “Well, it’s not spelled exactly paypal.com… close enough!” It’s the nightclub bouncer of cybersecurity: “Birthday matches, beard’s about right, in you go, Mr. President Putin.”
That’s all for Part 1, folks!
We’ve met the con artists and seen how they pull off the perfect disguise.
In Part 2 (dropping soon), we’re diving into real-world carnage: the famous cases where millions were stolen because someone swapped a single “o” for a Greek one. Spoiler: even huge companies and crypto exchanges got absolutely rinsed.
Then in Part 3 I’m giving you the full anti-phishing armoury: browser settings, tools, and habits that make these attacks bounce off you like rain on a duck’s back.
Stick around. Your bank balance will send you flowers.
Part 2 lands in a couple of days. Don’t get Cyrillic’d in the meantime! 😏
P.S. Comment below if you’re now side-eyeing every URL like a paranoid owl. You’re not alone. 🦉