As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in regards to keeping our businesses safe here’s another possible concern to add to your list.

Anick Jesdanun tells the story:

An Internet browser feature meant to permit Web addresses in Chinese, Arabic and other languages could encourage online fraudsters by making scam Web sites look legitimate to visitors.

For once, the affected browser is not the industry-leading Internet Explorer from Microsoft Corp. but rather several of its more robust competitors.

That’s because the aging IE lacks support for internationalized domain names, at least without a plug-in, which would then make IE vulnerable.

“It’s kind of ironic that it affects some of the supposedly safer browsers,” said Neel Mehta, a research engineer at the Internet Security Systems Inc.

A fix won’t be easy because the vulnerability, publicized at a weekend hacker conference, that enables so-called “phishing” scams involves a feature, not a coding error.

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