Spot the difference: homoglyphs

Can you spot the difference? When is the letter ‘a’ not the letter ‘a’? Characters, character sets, phishing, homoglyphs, and homograph attacks have been coming up a TON in recent conversations with clients.

I’m compelled to share this if it can help just one person in identifying this type of scam. Bad actors are taking advantage of the way our devices display characters. These characters might look similar to us, but the 1s and 0s behind the scenes are different.

A homograph attack: “is a way a malicious party may deceive computer users about what remote system they are communicating with, by exploiting the fact that many different characters look alike.”

Be on the lookout for this type of scam. Anymore, I’m using tools like VirusTotal’s URL scanner and urlscan[.]io on anything questionable.