AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting
Turns out decades-old email tricks still work against some LLM-powered email filters
Notice more spam getting through that corporate email filter lately? Attackers are using a technique known as "text salting," which hides benign-looking words intended to confuse some AI-powered email filters, says cybersecurity firm Barracuda.
The email security outfit said on Thursday that it had detected more than one million retail-themed phishing attacks using text salting since April. It’s not a new technique by any stretch and has been used to fool traditional secure email gateways for years, but Barracuda says it can also confuse machine-learning and LLM-based security tools.
Text salting involves peppering (sorry) a malicious email with random, harmless-seeming words in order to fool an email scanning system into thinking there’s nothing off about the flavor of a message (sorry again), tricking the system into passing it to its recipient for consumption (I’ll stop with the food...
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