A system to make it easier to create website addresses using alphabets like Cyrillic could open a back door for scammers, a trade body has warned.
The Internationalised Domain Names system has been a work in progress for years and has recently been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force. But the UK Internet Forum (UKIF) is concerned that the system will let scammers create fake sites more easily.
The problem lies in the computer codes used to represent language.
Registering names that look like that of legitimate companies but lead users to fake sites designed to steal passwords and credit card details could become a whole lot easier for determined scammers, says Stephen Dyer, director of UKIF.
Domain names are the "real language" addresses of websites, rather than their internet protocol address, which is a series of numbers. They are used so people can more easily navigate the web.
So-called ASCII codes are used to represent European languages but for other languages a hybrid of a system called Unicode is used.
So, for example, website PayPal could now be coded using a mixture of the Latin alphabet and the Russian alphabet.
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