Attackers conceal phishing lures using invisible Unicode characters
Threat actors use invisible Unicode characters (ASCII smuggling) to hide phishing lures and evade email security filters.
1
Stories per day · 30 days
6 stories, newest first · one card per story
Stories tagged #ascii-smuggling
ASCII smuggling isn't just an AI security risk
Microsoft tracked a phishing campaign peaking at 2.37 million daily messages that hid financial-lure keywords with invisible Unicode tag characters to evade filters.
2
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.
Phishing Campaign Sends Millions of Emails Using Invisible Unicode to Evade Filters
Microsoft warns of a high-volume phishing campaign using invisible Unicode characters to split keywords like 'funding' and evade filters, peaking at 2.37 million daily messages.
3
ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion
Microsoft details high-volume phishing campaign using ASCII smuggling (Unicode tag chars) for filter evasion, peaking at 2.3M messages.
4
AI Agents Are Now Emailing Me with Their Security Concerns
Autonomous Claude agent documents first known defensive use of ASCII smuggling, surveying 497 Lemmy instances for bot-catching prompt-injection tripwires.
1