Surfing the net has undoubtedly become one of the most widespread and most popular occupations of our world at the beginning of this century. Whether it is to maintain relationships with loved ones who are far away, to learn, to be entertained or to work, the Internet is the most powerful tool ever created. And, like any medal, the Internet has its own setback. The inability of the network to guarantee the security and confidentiality of our virtual activities is its only major flaw. Our personal data may be stolen overnight without our being able to prevent it or obtain justice. Through the Internet, a new type of crime has emerged: cybercrime.
These new criminals have no qualms about stealing, altering, making public or selling users' personal data. And they are constantly brainstorming to find more and more ways to defraud users of the net. Nowadays, they have become a real threat for businesses, states, and even ordinary citizens. They use multilingual character sets to create almost undetectable phishing sites. The biggest danger is for those who connect to the Internet on their smartphones, which represents the majority of the connected population of the world. The small size of the screens makes it impossible to differentiate between real legitimate sites and dummy sites intended to attract pigeons.
With their fake sites, they can pass for any serious business. Some pose as banks, loan advisors, and even global brands like Haribo or Lego, according to Farsight Security, a company that provides protection and online security services. An analysis by the same company on more than 100 million domain names using non-English character sets, revealed that 27% of them were created for criminal purposes. This same analysis revealed that there were more than 8000 different characters from which criminals could deceive people.
Edgar Turvey of security firm Wandera says that in recent months the number of illegitimate domains using the punycode has almost doubled. The criminals then used messages sent through applications to encourage users to visit links intended to open gaps in which they could rush. A study has shown that Internet users are three times more likely to be fooled by a phishing scam if it is launched on their phone. For Turvey, encouraging people to install malicious software or applications is too much work. The pirates therefore prefer to let people fall into traps cleverly tense. Because a good scam is the one that requires the least effort and gets the most results.
