Homograph Attack
A phishing technique that registers a lookalike domain using visually similar characters from other scripts, like Cyrillic 'а' instead of Latin 'a'.
A homograph attack (or IDN homograph attack) abuses the fact that many alphabets share visually identical glyphs. An attacker registers `аpple.com` using a Cyrillic 'а' (U+0430) that renders identically to the Latin 'a' but resolves to an entirely different domain. Once the punycode-decoded version is shown in the address bar, the visual is indistinguishable from the real brand. Modern browsers defend against this by showing the punycode form (xn--...) when a label mixes scripts or matches known-suspect patterns, but the attack remains effective in email, chat clients, and PDFs.