zlacker

What’s an IDN and what does blocking them help with?

>>cgb223+(OP)
Mainly homoglyphs. Characters that LOOK like Latin characters but aren't. Scammers register domains to make it look like at a glance you're visiting a reputable site.

It's why many browsers started defaulting to showing "xn--<whatever>" (punycode representation of IDN characters).

It sucks for domains that are emoji but whatevs. Scammers ruining things for everyone, as usual.

>>cgb223+(OP)
International domain name - blocking them prevents look alike URLs from working. But also, IMO, this is bad advice for anyone who uses not English as a language...

>>buildb+W2
If there's any non-English-speaking culture that embraced IDNs, I'd love to hear it. E.g. in my experience as a Russian speaker, Cyrillic very rarely shows up in domain names for legitimate websites, and correlates strongly with malware.

>>int_19+xm
The numbers agree. Only 69 Cyrillic domains (second-level) registered last year.

Chinese is the most popular, but only 760 for 2022 and the aggregate trend is down:

2016: 2378

2018: 2252

2020: 1675

2022: 1518

Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Annual Report 2022

[1] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-annual-repor...

>>NetOpW+u2
Blocking domains with mixed character sets? Might be hard to come up with the rules. But legit sites should stick to one language mostly.

>>ddeck+b31
Oh wow, that is super interesting data!!! Thanks for sharing