Cyrillic, zero-width letters and other Unicode oddities allow those with more nefarious intentions to set up a domain that, when rendered, displays as a well-known website.

Phishers and other online crooks are taking advantage of Unicode domain names in their pursuit of your passwords and other sensitive information. Here’s a simple way to protect yourself.

When IE 7 has prevented a domain name from being viewed as Unicode, an “information bar” notifies the user. Also new will be a “phishing filter” where target domain names are checked to ...