Tag

Ascii Smuggling

All articles tagged with #ascii smuggling

technology1 month ago•3 min saved

Invisible Unicode Tricks Power Large-Scale Phishing Campaign

Microsoft warns of a large-scale phishing campaign that hides messages by embedding invisible Unicode characters (ASCII smuggling) in finance-related words to evade filters; peak volume reached about 2.37 million daily messages in February and persisted into May; the campaign used ActiveCampaign infrastructure and was detected by Defender using other signals; defenders should normalize Unicode tag characters before detection and even before feeding content to AI to curb prompt-injection risks.

via BleepingComputer|

#ascii-smuggling #cybersecurity #email-security

technology1 month ago•3 min saved

Phishing Goes Incognito: Invisible Unicode Tricks Evade Filters

Microsoft uncovered a massive phishing campaign that used invisible Unicode tag characters to hide content and split keywords, a form of ASCII smuggling that can bypass filters and extend beyond AI prompts into traditional email scams. The campaign peaked at 2.37 million messages in late February from finance-themed domains with weekday bursts and weekend lulls, and declined thereafter. Defenders are advised to normalize/tokenize to strip non-rendering Unicode points and monitor behavioral patterns like weekday-on/weekend-off activity.

via The Register|

#ai-safety-cross-domain #ascii-smuggling #email-security

technology1 month ago•5 min saved

Invisible Unicode tricks fuel spam as ASCII smuggling widens its reach

An Ars Technica piece explains how “ASCII smuggling” uses invisible Unicode tag characters to hide malicious prompts in emails, enabling spammers to evade filters and trick AI detectors. Microsoft Defender logged a sharp spike in ASCII-smuggling signatures in early 2026, highlighting that traditional keyword searches and even some ML-based spam detectors can miss these hidden tokens unless filters are updated to account for invisible characters or use OCR-like analysis.

via Ars Technica|

#ai-prompt-injection #ascii-smuggling #email-security