Changing characters: something exotic in place of regular Latin script

Spammers use all types of tricks to bypass spam filters: adding ‘noise’ to texts, inserting redirects to advertised sites, replacing text with pictures – anything to stop the automatic filter from reading the keywords and blocking the message. Recently, we’ve been seeing a trend to replace Latin characters with similar-looking symbols from other alphabets. This “font kink” is especially typical of phishing messages written in Italian.

Non-Latin characters are inserted in place of similar-looking Latin characters both in the “Subject” field and in the body of the message. Here is an example of what headers obscured with ‘foreign’ symbols look like:

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