14 DAY TRIAL // Spammers keep coming up with new ways to evade spam filters. Recently, they’ve started replacing regular characters with similar-looking symbols in hopes that their scammy emails make it to inboxes.
According to experts from Kaspersky Lab, the subject and the body of these spam emails might appear to be normal at first sight. However, a closer look reveals that many Latin characters have been replaced with symbols that look similar from other alphabets.
This trend appears to be popular among cybercriminals targeting users in Italy. Experts have spotted various types of spam messages in which this technique is utilized. The spammers use Cyrillic, Greek and even IPA symbols to replace Latin characters.
This is possible because of the UTF-8 coding system, which enables users to combine multiple types of characters in the same message.
This simple trick could be enough to bypass classic spam filters. On the other hand, Kaspersky says its own anti-spam solutions are not so easy to trick. They can detect spam even if non-Latin characters are utilized.
In any case, this proves that we can’t rely only on service providers to keep our inbox spam free. Users must always be careful when opening links or attachments from unsolicited emails.
Check out the fake PayPal email spotted by Kaspersky. Would you notice that there’s something wrong with it?