Abstract: Cybercriminals have become more adept at leveraging subtle differences in URLs to deceive people and, with that, phishing attacks have become one of the most subtle types of cyber threats, if not the most subtle. A particularly insidious variant is so-called homograph attacks which exploit the visual similarity of the characters from different scripts (for example, Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek) to craft a convincing domain name. However, these modifications, which use diacritic characters, almost negate the possibility of users being able to discriminate between legitimate and fraudulent URLs and result in credential theft, financial fraud, and malware distribution......
Keywords —Phishing attacks, homograph attacks, cybersecurity, URL modifications, Punycode conversion, browser security, social engineering, credential theft, cyber threats, AI-driven phishing detection
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