Spammers are constantly inventing new ways to bypass filters and conventional spam. This time, the crafty ones thought of replacing certain characters with similar symbols and letters, hoping that their emails will end up in the inboxes of potential recipients.
According to security researchers at Kaspersky Lab, the subject and content of spam emails may appear normal at first glance. However, upon closer inspection, recipients may find that many Latin characters have been replaced with similar symbols from other alphabets.
This trend seems to be popular among cybercriminals targeting Italian users. Experts have identified several types of spam messages using this technique. Spammers use Cyrillic, Greek, and even IPA symbols to replace Latin characters.
This is possible because of the UTF-8 encoding system, which allows users to combine different types of characters in the same message. Using this simple trick, spammers manage to successfully bypass classic spam filters.
