Google is boosting Gmail’s ability to detect and block malicious emails from spammers and scammers that exploit similarities among Unicode characters to dupe users into clicking on bad links.
Unicode provides
a standard for character encoding for all the writing systems in the world, along with technical symbols, punctuation and other text characters.
Because characters among different scripts are often very similar—such as the Latin and Cyrillic scripts’ characters for the lowercase letter “a”—spam and phishing emails often combine them in website links that otherwise look legitimate to the unsuspecting eye.
