RedmondASCII smuggling spam spiked to 1.3 million daily.
The same invisible characters that hijacked AI agents now dodge spam filters.
Unicode tag characters render nothing to readers but split words into unfamiliar tokens machine classifiers miss.
Normalizing input at ingest would stop it, but major mail platforms still don’t by default.
How each outlet framed it
- Ars Technica
- emphasizes technical vector—invisible Unicode tags bypass human detection but read to LLMs, detections jumped 21k to 1.3M in February
Sources: Ars Technica