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2 stories in the last 30d

Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers

Spammers adopt ASCII smuggling—invisible Unicode tag characters—to evade email filters, with Microsoft Defender detections spiking to 2.5 million per day.

ASCII smuggling hides text in Unicode tag characters (e.g., U+E0041 for "A") that are invisible to humans but readable by LLMs and text processors. The technique gained attention as a stealthy prompt-injection vector and is now used by spammers to obfuscate keywords from email detectors. Microsoft reported Defender for Office smuggling detections jumped from roughly 21,000 per day to over 1.3 million in early February, reaching 2.5 million within four days, before falling sharply in mid-May.

Ars Technica · Security · 12d agoPhishing & fraud

Scammers are getting smarter about where they target you

Malwarebytes data shows scammers tailor fraud by platform: 90% of toll scams arrive via email/SMS and MrBeast is now the most impersonated person.

Malwarebytes threat research analyzed global scam data from April 15 to July 14, 2026, across more than 20 scam types, finding each type favors a specific channel such as email, SMS, phone, or social media. Roughly nine in ten toll scams arrive by email or text, about half of IRS scams come by phone, and MrBeast is impersonated in about 30% of impersonation scams. The most impersonated brands are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox, and Amazon, and Malwarebytes blocks around 500,000 phishing websites daily. Gaming scams on Roblox, Steam, Discord, and Minecraft increasingly carry losses of $1,000 or more, with 15-19% activity spikes in mid-2026.

Malwarebytes Labs · 14d agoPhishing & fraud