The introduction of Internet addresses in non-Roman scripts could offer fresh opportunities to cyber-criminals, experts have warned.
Next year the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) will for the first time accept Internet domain names in non-Roman scripts. The domain name is the part of a Web address that precedes the "dot", such as timesonline or foxnews.
The new internationalized domain names will open up the Internet as never before to users whose native language does not use the Roman alphabet. But Roman-reading users face a possible deluge of phishing and e-mail scams.
"With Cyrillic, Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese scripts now possible, this threatens to be like a hydra," Simon Bennett, an intellectual property lawyer with the law firm Arnold & Porter, told The Times."You cut off one head and another grows in its place."
The problem for Western users is that the Internet addresses of many well-known companies, such as Apple, Yahoo, Google and PayPal, can also be rendered to look identical in Cyrillic scripts, such as Russian.
To a Roman-reading eye, an e-mail containing a link to any one of these sites might appear genuine, while to a Russian-reading eye, paypal for example reads as raural. An e-mail link could thus lead to a clone site constructed by unscrupulous thieves, who could then use it to harvest personal and financial details, or to steal cash.
This is known as phishing, and Russia is such a known global center for organized online crime that it has been the subject of special talks between the governments of Russian and the United States.
"They [Icann] seem to have started the process of allowing people to register domain names in non-Roman characters but don’t seem to have put in place anything that obligates any registry to safeguard trademark rights or the rights of legitimate businesses that use the same name," Mr Bennett said.
"There's going to be a lot more scope for people to take advantage. Icann just doesn't think these things through properly."
For more on this issue, read the full story at The London Times.
