Donuts, the registry that manages the DPML block, announced that all DPML blocks will now include homograph protection. This new feature is designed to protect DPML subscribers from an increasingly common phishing technique. The objective of a homographic domain is to imitate a brand or recognizable domain name through the use of an IDN (Internationalized Domain Name). For example, say a malicious person wants to send out emails to Google users, to fool them into providing confidential account and credit card information. The source email address from the phisher might read, “info@gοοgle.com”. Note that the two O’s in the email address are actually Cyrillic characters. Hard to spot, unless you’re trained to look for it.

Donuts' system will analyze the content of each trademark identified in a DPML subscription and compare it to a list of "confusingly similar" characters. The resulting versions of the original trademark will be blocked within all Donuts extensions expanding the trademark owner's brand protection. This feature is automatically included in all DPML subscriptions.