The Hacker News on X: " An invisible

X • September 4, 2026

The Hacker News @TheHackersNews 🚨 An invisible-Unicode phishing campaign peaked at an estimated 2.37 million emails in one day. Attackers split financial terms like “funding” with hidden tag characters, breaking literal keyword matches while the text looked normal to recipients. Read: thehackernews.com/2026/09/phishi… 3:58 PM · Sep 4, 2026 8.4K Views 5

BullBear.News @bullbear_info 1h regex rules relying on literal string matching without normalizing hidden codepoints always fail here

مستر حكيم @dsoajh 1h A sophisticated phishing campaign involved over 2.37 million emails in a single day, using hidden Unicode characters to evade detection while appearing normal to recipients.

Jace @chaosInProd 1h Nothing digital is fully safe these days

The full story

This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.

Phishing Campaign Exploits ASCII Smuggling to Evade Detection Microsoft has identified a high-volume phishing campaign utilizing ASCII smuggling, a technique that employs invisible Unicode tag characters to evade email filters. The attackers split financial lure words like 'funding' using these characters, making the emails appear normal to recipients while bypassing detection systems. This campaign peaked in late February 2026, with over 2.37 million messages sent in a single day, and continued at elevated levels until mid-June. The attackers leveraged the ActiveCampaign marketing platform to distribute AI-generated phishing emails targeting Small Business Administration loan applicants. Microsoft observed a significant increase in flagged messages, indicating the effectiveness of this method against traditional and AI-based filters. The campaign highlights the adaptation of AI-era evasion techniques into conventional phishing strategies, emphasizing the need for enhanced detection measures. 35 sources 68

Extracted Entities

The Hacker News on X: " An invisible

The full story

Extracted Entities

Attack Types (1)

Domains (1)

MITRE ATT&CK (1)