8 ms·
Microsoft says email spammers are adopting ASCII smuggling
- rkagerer 7d agoWhoever thought it was acceptable to have a string of text that renders something unreadable or not immediately obvious to the human eye, was a complete moron. I realize ASCII was limited, but one thing I like about it is I can understand every single character code, and program to handle all the edge cases with certainty.
- kevin_thibedeau 7d agoThe tags were needed for language indication to control CJK glyph variants. Flag emoji were grafted onto this scheme. The key is that tag sequences have to start with a valid introductory codepoint. Simple enough to strip out anything that isn't a flag.
- thephyber 7d ago> Simple enough to strip out anything that isn't a flag. But it's not simple enough for every company/app to independently research the entire Unicode code point space (which is MASSIVE) to find out what kinds of "fix ups" that app needs to do to clean the data it consumes. It's complicated or at least has difficult tradeoffs. Maybe you invest a lot of time carefully surveying all of the Unicode planes and decide which ones you care to keep unchanged and which ones you filter/strip. For every code point you reject or change, there is going to be some user who is confused or dissatisfied with the limitations of your app.
- twoodfin 7d ago“Everyone knew” that in-band signaling was an awful, horribly insecure idea… until we found magic math that couldn’t “think” any other way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the Unicode authors for not anticipating this turn of events.
- thephyber 6d agoMaybe you intended to reply to my comment's parent? I don't necessarily disagree. But also, according to the Ars article comment describing the Unicode character range, it has been deprecated, so maybe someone involved in the Unicode standard saw problems with it.
- SoftTalker 7d agoEven classic ASCII has "unreadable" control codes, but to be fair they would not be confused with text even by an LLM. Well probably not.
- rkagerer 5d agoSure, but there's a big difference between a handful (or a few dozen), compared to thousands of obscure code points. One I can learn, the other I need to dedicate an unreasonably large chunk of my life to fully understand.
- embedding-shape 7d ago> I realize ASCII was limited, but one thing I like about it is I can understand every single character code It's great for teaching and other things, but everyday life is filled with many characters, is the suggestion we'd have one ASCII per language where there is more distinct characters, or what would we do? I don't see what else we could have done, that would have worked for the world, but I'm curious to hear ideas.
- rkagerer 5d agoA good start would be being more judicious about what sort of "characters" and functionality to include.
- thephyber 7d agoThe top comment (the Staff Highlighted one) explains why this range of code point exists. There was a rationale (ISO country codes to modify a flag to display that national flag). Maybe the problem wasn't the proposal, but the lack of the ability for others to reject it for being insecure.
- rkagerer 5d agoWhy does a line of text need to include a flag in the first place? If you want an image, embed an image.
- gschizas 7d agoWhy not sanitize and denormalize (or whatever it's called) the text before feeding it to the spam filter? Or the LLM prompt?
- thephyber 7d agoDo you have any evidence they didn't? My suspicion is that the spam filter programmers didn't do a comprehensive evaluation of every code point on every plane of Unicode because... well that's a massive job. So your "sanitize and denormalize" tasks are actually massive mappings which were likely imperfectly created.
- gschizas 7d agoI'm basing my comment on the article. Since they are susceptible to ASCII smuggling, they can't have been doing unicode normalization. The task isn't that massive. Python's unicodedata (for example) contains all the info already. Including the normalization (not denormalization as I wrote before) function. Is there something I'm missing?
- gerdesj 7d ago[flagged]
- zamadatix 7d agoThe standard issue meme is usually the other way around: it's deliverability which is often a PITA, not receiving. My previous ISP wouldn't even unblock outbound SMTP unless I switched to a business plan.
- gerdesj 7d agoSomehow I manage it for quite a few domains. You have to do email due-dil and off you trot. Gmail, MS and co really do respect the rules in my estimation and don't simply dump email out of spite. If you go in with at least everything up to SPF working, you are normally good to go. DKIM and DMARC and all the rest are even better. I run my own DNS too and am on good terms with upstream so DNSSEC is available. Like I said, it requires some effort but so do most things in life.
- perching_aix 7d agoA few years ago, during a particularly spam heavy period, I got pissed at Google's ineptness at combating spam, and decided to have a think about how I could get rid of the problem for good. What I arrived at: - I should never hand out my actual email address. As in, should be all proxied, every contact reaching me via a different address only known to them. Ideally, these aliases would be generated using a CSPRNG, and would be of sufficient length. Allows for tracing contact provenance in "space". - I should rotate that address periodically, if possible. Allows for tracing contact provenance in "time". Together, this would tell me who's the source of any particular influx of strange mails, and when did they leak the contact address provided to them (willfully or otherwise). This would enable me to separate the wheat from the chaff and nuke that address for good, inform the other party, etc. I was really taken by this idea, even wondered why this has not been baked into the underlying protocols over the years, to make it readily deployed and available for all, making it effortless. Because boy is there an effort involved! Several years later, I now avoid spam mail by simply no longer reading my emails anymore... Sometimes I wonder what corporate IT thinks when I pass their anti-phishing test a month after the test campaign.
- SoftTalker 7d agoI estimate that I can identify 99.5% of spam by the subject line alone. I don't know why its such a hard problem, and why renewal notices for Norton 360 Premium sent to "Customer" from a random gmail address keep passing as legitimate email.
- cam_l 7d agoHell, just block all emails mentioning Norton 360. Wouldn't be any great loss to the world. But what I don't understand is MS letting these through the spam filter but randomly, in a thread between myself and another person both using MS account emails, sending a single email in that thread to spam.
- smalltorch 7d ago>Several years later, I now avoid spam mail by simply no longer reading my emails anymore... I realized the other day I haven't even checked my main email in months and I missed absolutely noting important.
- CrimsonRain 7d agoGetting bombarded by "Paypal" <somethingsomething@something.onmicrosoft.com> spam for months and Microsoft (outlook) can't handle that. This is beyond their level.
- Terr_ 7d agoFor anyone still fortunately-unfamilier: Microsoft has some supposedly limited-purpose e-mail notifications and invites which are quasi-legitimate... but they failed on the UX level, allowing spammers to pack seemingly-innocent fields like Organization Name with content that becomes the (apparent) main content of the e-mail.
- CrimsonRain 7d agoYeah; imagine getting not junk...actual PayPal phishing emails, daily, multiple, from onmicrosoft.com (owned by Microsoft), in Outlook (owned by Microsoft), and report phishing does nothing. > The root domain onmicrosoft.com is owned and managed by Microsoft Corporation, which uses it as the default domain for Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud environments
- saidnooneever 7d agoimagine that these people have most money in the world. Bill Gates (owns MS). Elon Musk (owns / owned PayPal). Now stop wondering why and start using other services.
- Terr_ 7d agoThat seems like a non-sequitur. Parent-poster wasn't lamenting monopolies, they were just incredulous that some supposedly well-resourced and integrated company still can't get its act together to stop a well-understood problem.
- shuwix 7d ago[dead]
- righthand 7d agoMicrosoft is a spammer and spamming platform themselves so this seems like a distraction.
- k12sosse 7d agoAs a common-name@gmail.com holder, unfiltered spam is less commonplace than a) websites adding me to distribution/mailing lists without verifying I was the person to type it in, b) people who either accidentally transform their address into mine, or forget part of their address. These are from all parts of the globe. I have access to bank accounts in South America, Disney employee music royalty earnings tax disclosures and forms, European subscribers online platforms, AWS account recovery options, veterinarian records in Studio City, private school/PTA leadership website access in Mountain View. I stopped trying to return unopened mail, nobody cared. I don't do anything with any of this because I'm not a giant fool, but people, have your users verify their email addresses before you trust them.
- nabbed 7d agoHa! Me too. I have first.last@gmail.com, which means firstlast@gmail.com (without the dot) also maps to my email account. (first and last are placeholders for my actual name, of course). I get lots of stuff intended for other people (including a mildly famous person with my name whose actual email address is last.first@gmail.com). A few years ago, someone set up a shopify account with my email address. Overnight while I slept, the shopify account was created, did some bad stuff, and got suspended for fraudulent activity. The whole story was told through the series of emails coming in over a couple of hours. Shopify did not required the fraudster to confirm the email address to activate the account. When I asked shopify to unlink my email address from this fraudster account, they instructed me to click on the "forgot my password" link on their login page, click on the "change password" link in the resulting email, and then login and remove my email from the account. This was my only option, they claimed. Obviously, I was never going to connect my IP address with some fraudster's Shopify account, so I just left it as-is. I guess services feel it adds too much "friction" to force a user to verify the specified email account before allowing them to use the service.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- jongjong 7d agoCurrently, my experience is that spam filters often block non-spam messages and allow many spam messages through. Platform notifications are spam! Yes, even if I signed up for it, I agreed to be contacted by the company, I never agreed to be spammed by them 100 messages a day. Platforms should aggregate all their notifications into a single daily or weekly email unless the thing is marked urgent! It's not difficult to do!