Spammers Using Soft Hyphen To Hide Malicious URLs

Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt from ThreatPost illustrating the ongoing Spy-vs.-Spy battle between spammers and the rest of us: "Spammers have jumped on the little-used soft hyphen (or SHY character) to fool URL filtering devices. According to researchers, spammers are larding up URLs for sites they promote with the soft hyphen character, which many browsers ignore. Spammers aren't shy about jumping humans flexible cognitive abilities to slip past the notice of spam filters (H3rb41 V14gr4, anyone?). ... The latest trend involves the use of an obscure character called the soft hyphen or 'SHY' character to obscure malicious URLs in spam messages. Writing on the Symantec Connect blog, researcher Samir Patil said that the company has seen recent spam messages that insert the HTML symbol for the soft hyphen to obfuscate URLs for Web pages promoted by the spammers."

Shy Spammers

[biryokumaru]

Spammers are getting more shy? That's a relief!

What is it?

[iONiUM]

Why didn't they just put the friggin character in the summary so I didn't have to read the article?

Anyways, according to the article it's &shy, which looks "identical to a regular hyphen." Are you happy now slashdot? I had to read TFA to find that out.

Re:So how often is it used legitimately?

[Cinder6]

Well, I know I've certainly never seen it!

shy

[Anonymous Coward]

No good shysters.

The Wrongest Part

[SuperKendall]

The thing that really grates on the nerves, is using a soft-hypen to sell Viagra.

Re:H3rb41 V14gr4?

[commodore64_love]

I think this photograph is appropriate. And I'm happy to say: No I can't read it.

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/picture/strober/get_laid.jpg [ebaumsworld.com]

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

"Exactly it's purpose. It's never supposed to be shown,"
Sort of like the useless apostrophe you hammered into a harmless possessive pronoun? Why do so many people not get it? They can master dozens of abstruse and recondite subjects, but it's means IT IS defeats them. Why?

Re:Why

[modecx]

Speaking of bloody sauerkraut, I think there was some sort of hyphen-depression when the inventors of the German language decided it would be fun to glue adjectives and nouns together. i.e. when I see something like: unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen, I have an nigh-irresistible urge to shout Gesundheit!

I'm still not sure why the nazis went to all of the trouble of building cipher-machines. The language looks sufficiently jumbled from the start.

terrible summary

[Laxori666]

Is it just me or is this summary terrible? Every sentence says the same thing, just slightly reworded. In the summary, it's as if each new sentence doesn't give any additional information, but it's worded as if it does. Researchers have found that this summary is repetitive. Some say this can indicate the repetitiveness of a summary.

Re:H3rb41 V14gr4?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like my hyphen hard, not soft. That's why I use H3rb41 V14gr4.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

That second apostrophe is fine. It's only the first that needs to be dropped. What I don't understand is who teaches kid's to use apostrophe for use in plural's. Some friend's of mine are real idiot's. Where are kid's learning this from?