EURid, the registry operating the European Union’s .EU domain, has recently announced that all Cyrillic names in the domain will be deleted on May 31, 2019. This decision is based on ICANN’s recommendations on avoiding letters from alphabets other than Latin in the names of internationalized domains in order to limit the risk of homograph phishing attacks. This type of attacks involves using Cyrillic letters in Latin domain names to create fake domains, which appear as the same or similar to domain names of famous brands.
In its article, Domain Incite notes that this decision will only apply to .EU domain names that have Cyrillic letters, and will not affect the internationalized .ЕЮ version. Notably, Bulgaria is the only EU member state to use Cyrillic alphabet in its national language.
