Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) is dedicated to customer satisfaction and tries meeting all the needs of customers. Recently, with the growth of internet and its vast usage has brought many fraudulent practices into existence. There is a wave of spammers, who try to steal personal information of the users by tricking them and this is mostly done through mails.
Google fights phishing attacks with filters
Consistent efforts are being made by the web giant for fighting these attacks and protecting the unsuspecting users. For this, Google has devised a new tool, which will effectively block the spammers from getting to the Gmail accounts of users. A new spam filtering has been added by the company to its email platform as informed on Tuesday. The scammers will be prevented from sending any misleading or phishing messages to the Gmail users
The spammers fool people making use of the similar looking letters from the Unicode Consortium, and the new filters designed by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) will efficiently deal with those. Unicode standard icons are capable of working across platforms and hence used by most of the companies, apps and websites. Problem arises when some characters that look nearly identical are used by spammers and the layman is not able to predict any suspicious behavior. For example, the Latin and Cyrillic lowercase “a.”
How spammers misuse similarity of alphabets?
Mark Risher, from Google’s Spam and Abuse team, explained how the spammers misuse these characters in a blog post where he stated that “Scammers can exploit the fact that ဝ, ૦, and ο look nearly identical to the letter o, and by mixing and matching them, they can hoodwink unsuspecting victims,” and added, “Can you imagine the risk of clicking ‘ShဝppingSite’ vs. ‘ShoppingSite’ or ‘MyBank’ vs. ‘MyBɑnk?”
These types of character combinations are listed as ‘highly restricted’ by the Unicode Consortium’. The email sent by spammers containing these combinations will be easily identified by the new filters from Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), which will knock them out from the emails received by the Gmail users.
The Unicode Consortium informed that the basis for “processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language in all modern software and information technology protocols,” is provided by the Unicode encoding standard.
