Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
can be abused to allow spoofing of web page addresses. This can allow phishing
attacks to be more convincing. To protect against IDN spoofing in
Internet Explorer, enable the Always show encoded addresses option.
This will cause IDN addresses to be displayed in an encoded form in the
Internet Explorer address bar and status bar, which will remove the visual
similarity to the spoofing target address.
US-CERT also recommends that you disable the Play
sounds in webpages option. Sounds in web pages are rarely
integral to web page content, and may also introduce security risks by
having the browser process additional untrusted data. This option is for
Internet Explorer’s ability to natively handle sounds. It will not interfere
with other software, such as Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime.
