An easy way to protect yourself against Phishing attacks

Scammers have been using international domain names to trick people into visiting a fake phishing website. These fake domain names can look almost identical to the real thing and can catch even the most careful user.

Here is an example of a phishing URL. You can see how easy it would be to mistake this address for the real thing.

Here is the real address:

Rather than having to inspect every domain name with a magnifying glass there is a much easier way to reveal the fake website. Use Punycode.

Here is the Google description of punycode:

Punycode is a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is a smaller, restricted character set. Punycode is used to encode internationalized domain names (IDN).

If you have punycode enabled in your browser, this is how the fake URL would appear:

Now that is much easier to spot.

Unfortunately, most browsers have this feature disabled by default which I think is a terrible idea but I guess they must have their reasons.

This is how you enable punycode in Firefox:

In your Firefox address bar type in: about:config

Next, in the search box type: network.IDN_show_punycode

Finally, click on the listed item to change it to True

and that's it. Now you're protected from international domain names phishing attacks and you can put your magnifying glass away.

For Chrome users, I'm sorry but I don't know how to display punycode in Chrome but I'm sure there must be a way. If anyone else knows how to fix this in Google Chrome could you explain in the comments below. Thanks.

A WORD OF WARNING:

This will not protect you from every phishing attack. You still need to remain vigilant, especially while your browsing the crypto space