PayPaI
Encyclopedia
Paypai is a phishing scam, which targets account holders of the widely-used internet payment service, PayPal
, using the fact that a capital "i" may be difficult to distinguish from a lower-case "L" in some computer fonts
; a so-called homograph attack. It sends PayPal account holders a notification email, saying "PayPal temporarily suspended your account".
It was active before in mid 2000. PayPal then sent account holders a notification email when they received payments. Spam
was sent out, mimicking these payment notifications and indicating that the account holder had received a large payment and directed recipients to paypai.com through a link in the message.
The site, paypai.com, was an exact replica of the HTML source code and images that PayPal uses on its home page. While devious, this was not difficult, since the HTML and images are downloaded for display whenever a user visits a website. The site was registered with "Network Solutions" to a "Birykov" in South Ural, Russia. The site was quickly shut down.
At the time, MS Sans Serif
, a font similar to Arial
that rendered capital I and lowercase l almost identically, was the default font in the address bar on most Windows applications. When Windows XP
was released in 2001, Tahoma
became the default; Tahoma places serifs on the capital I to easily distinguish it from lowercase l.
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
, using the fact that a capital "i" may be difficult to distinguish from a lower-case "L" in some computer fonts
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
; a so-called homograph attack. It sends PayPal account holders a notification email, saying "PayPal temporarily suspended your account".
It was active before in mid 2000. PayPal then sent account holders a notification email when they received payments. Spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
was sent out, mimicking these payment notifications and indicating that the account holder had received a large payment and directed recipients to paypai.com through a link in the message.
The site, paypai.com, was an exact replica of the HTML source code and images that PayPal uses on its home page. While devious, this was not difficult, since the HTML and images are downloaded for display whenever a user visits a website. The site was registered with "Network Solutions" to a "Birykov" in South Ural, Russia. The site was quickly shut down.
At the time, MS Sans Serif
MS Sans Serif
MS Sans Serif is a proportional raster font introduced in Windows 1.x as "Helv". It changed to its current name starting with Windows 3.1. It is the default system font on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, and Windows ME. It shares spots with typefaces like Terminal, Fixedsys,...
, a font similar to Arial
Arial
Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with Microsoft Windows, some other Microsoft software applications, Apple Mac OS X and many PostScript 3 computer printers...
that rendered capital I and lowercase l almost identically, was the default font in the address bar on most Windows applications. When Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
was released in 2001, Tahoma
Tahoma (typeface)
Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the Microsoft Corporation in 1994 with initial distribution along with Verdana for Windows 95....
became the default; Tahoma places serifs on the capital I to easily distinguish it from lowercase l.
See also
- IDN homograph attackIDN homograph attackThe internationalized domain name homograph attack is a way a malicious party may deceive computer users about what remote system they are communicating with, by exploiting the fact that many different characters look alike,...
- ZDNet UK - PayPal alert! Beware the 'PaypaI' scam