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EP. 157: Hackers Use Invisible Unicode to Bypass Email Security
Summary
Attackers have adopted ASCII smuggling techniques in large-scale phishing campaigns, inserting invisible characters from the Unicode Tags block U+E0000-U+E007F into financial lure words to interfere with email filtering while leaving the text visually normal to recipients.
Microsoft's telemetry showed activity rising from roughly 21,000 signature hits on February 8 to more than 1.3 million on February 9, before peaking above 2.3 million messages on February 11. The high-volume phase continued for roughly three months.
Microsoft says more than 99% of the observed messages were…
The skinny
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