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Tech, , 9 sources.
Spammers adopt invisible Unicode tricks once used against AI systems
Ars Technica reports that spammers are using ASCII smuggling, a technique involving nearly invisible Unicode tag characters, to obscure words from email filters while leaving messages readable to recipients. Microsoft said detections surged from about 21,000 daily signatures to more than 1.3 million in February 2026, peaked at 2.5 million within four days, and declined sharply in May. The technique can disrupt literal keyword matching and machine-learning classifiers, prompting Microsoft to issue guidance for detecting it.