Spammers Using Soft Hyphen To Hide Malicious URLs

Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt from ThreatPost illustrating the ongoing Spy-vs.-Spy battle between spammers and the rest of us: "Spammers have jumped on the little-used soft hyphen (or SHY character) to fool URL filtering devices. According to researchers, spammers are larding up URLs for sites they promote with the soft hyphen character, which many browsers ignore. Spammers aren't shy about jumping humans flexible cognitive abilities to slip past the notice of spam filters (H3rb41 V14gr4, anyone?). ... The latest trend involves the use of an obscure character called the soft hyphen or 'SHY' character to obscure malicious URLs in spam messages. Writing on the Symantec Connect blog, researcher Samir Patil said that the company has seen recent spam messages that insert the HTML symbol for the soft hyphen to obfuscate URLs for Web pages promoted by the spammers."

Comments

HTML 5

[Dthief]

The advent of HTML 5 within the next couple years - and browsers that support it - is expected to solve many of these problems, because that specification finally standardizes how HTML code should be parsed by Web browsers, rather than leaving it up to individual platform vendors to develop their own interpretations of how the code should be parsed.

I bet 4pple is behind the spam trying to further promote 1-1TML-5.......$t3v3 J0b$ l0v3s v14gr4

Journalism at its best

[T Murphy]

Let's take the summary (copy+pasted from the article) and summarize each sentence (compare to the summary if you think I exaggerate):

Spammers are using the soft hyphen. Spammers are using the soft hyphen. ...Spammers are using the soft hyphen. "Spammers are using the soft hyphen."

Yes, each sentence says a little bit more, but it still repeats the same fact over and over. I usually don't complain about slashdot summaries, but this was honestly painful to read. Just because you copy+pasted what TFA says doesn't mean it's okay.