Lloydsbank, IIoydsbank – researcher highlights the homographic phishing problem by Graham Cluley.
Homographs are words that share the same form but have a different meaning.
Think of bow:
and bow:
Graham’s post is about words that “look alike” due to default font sets, like an uppercase “I” and lowercase “l.”
In his post you will find the familiar lloydsbank.co.uk (legitimate) being confused with IIoydsbank.co.uk (not a legitimate site). The second site starts with double ii written in capitals. 😉
Graham has also written about Cyrillic letters that are very similar to Latin ones in Wɑit! Stοp! Is that ℓιηκ what it claims to be?
I don’t know of a survey of all the “similar” letters in Unicode but they aren’t limited to Cyrillic.
If such a list were available, users could be warned by browsers that the default font was displaying non-Latin characters (which are auto-corrected by your brain).
Graham concludes with good advice:
Maybe the best advice of all is to never click on links to financial websites if you receive them in an email or see them on a website.