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# Same Look, Different Code: The Technical Reality Behind Homoglyph Attacks

**[Security Boulevard](https://daily.dev/sources/securityboulevard)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Homoglyph attacks exploit the gap between how characters look and how computers interpret them. By substituting visually identical characters from different Unicode scripts (e.g., Cyrillic 'а' for Latin 'a'), attackers can register deceptive domains, spoof email addresses, forge file names, and bypass string-matching security filters. The attack relies on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and Punycode encoding, which allows browsers to display Unicode domains while resolving to entirely different attacker-controlled destinations. The post walks through the attack construction steps — target selection, finding confusable characters, crafting deceptive assets, and infrastructure setup — and recommends defenses including Unicode-aware application design, mixed-script detection, domain monitoring, and continuous security testing.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://securityboulevard.com/2026/07/same-look-different-code-the-technical-reality-behind-homoglyph-attacks>

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---

Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#phishing](https://daily.dev/tags/phishing)

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