Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers

A once-overlooked block of unicode that's invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use. A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns. The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling [1].

Sources

1. arstechnica.com · Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers Sep 4, 2026

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