Developer Xudong Zheng created a web page to educate people about a new security threat online. The danger was rooted in the weaknesses of several browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
He found that web addresses could have one appearance while being registered as something completely different.
To show the potential danger, he set up a dummy site. https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/ is a URL appearing in several browsers as www.apple.com. How did he do it? Keep reading to find out.
Back in the early 90’s, only ASCII characters were used in domain names. ASCII, short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, assigns a number code to each standard English character. If you were working in certain industries or in college school during the 80’s and 90’s, you may remember using it to share document texts between computers and countries.