4 ms·
What’s an IDN and what does blocking them help with?
by cgb223 4y ago
What’s an IDN and what does blocking them help with?
- NetOpWibby 4y agoMainly homoglyphs. Characters that LOOK like Latin characters but aren't. Scammers register domains to make it look like at a glance you're visiting a reputable site. It's why many browsers started defaulting to showing "xn--<whatever>" (punycode representation of IDN characters). It sucks for domains that are emoji but whatevs. Scammers ruining things for everyone, as usual.
- quickthrower2 4y agoBlocking domains with mixed character sets? Might be hard to come up with the rules. But legit sites should stick to one language mostly.
- buildbot 4y agoInternational domain name - blocking them prevents look alike URLs from working. But also, IMO, this is bad advice for anyone who uses not English as a language...
- int_19h 4y agoIf there's any non-English-speaking culture that embraced IDNs, I'd love to hear it. E.g. in my experience as a Russian speaker, Cyrillic very rarely shows up in domain names for legitimate websites, and correlates strongly with malware.
- ddeck 4y agoThe numbers agree. Only 69 Cyrillic domains (second-level) registered last year. Chinese is the most popular, but only 760 for 2022 and the aggregate trend is down: 2016: 2378 2018: 2252 2020: 1675 2022: 1518 Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Annual Report 2022 [1] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-annual-report-2022-16feb23-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-annual-repor...
- buildbot 4y agoOh wow, that is super interesting data!!! Thanks for sharing