Yet another reason to never click links in email
Friday, October 30, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3925 messages posted)
ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
just approved using non-Latin characters in ccTLDs (country code top-level domains).
Now, when you click on that link,
there's an even greater chance[1] that it could be sending you to a phishing site
which has used characters (e.g. from the Cyrillic alphabet)
that only LOOK like English.[2]
...and it doesn't matter
that the email looks like it came from your friend/bank/whatever;
address books have been hijacked on Windoze boxes for years.
[1] It's been eons since tricksters started using link text
that displays something different than the actual URL of the link
in an effort to deceive you.
NEVER CLICK LINKS IN EMAIL.
If you want to go to the site,
CUT AND PASTE the link into your Address Bar and **examine** it.
Nowadays, it would be a good idea
to paste it into an ancient, mostly-useless app (like NotePad)
which doesn't understand non-ASCII characters.
That quickly shows the Roman-looking text to be otherwise.
[2] Standard browers make such characters look like gibberish in your Address Bar
--but only **AFTER** you have gone to the site.
e.g. http://google.com/search?q=Ćuk+Čuk+Cúk
should come back as
q=%C4%86uk+%C4%8Cuk+C%C3%BAk
For your amusement, note also the number of inane guesses
that Google makes with this search string (especially after about the 14th item).
You can also expect a lot of URL-parsing software to break after this.
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