Science and Technology › Computing and AI
Cyber security and data protection
Cyber security and data protection: how attacks work, including those on artificial intelligence systems and critical infrastructure, cyber crime, the agencies that respond, and the law that protects personal data. It serves GS3 answers on cyber security.
6 Sep 2026 · Prelims
ASCII smuggling
Unicode extends ASCII to the world's scripts, keeping ASCII itself as its own first 128 characters. It also carries tag characters, which copy those 128 but never show on screen, and hiding them inside ordinary text is what ASCII smuggling means.
Hide
Tag characters are slipped into a message, inside a word such as funding or as hidden instructions
Software reads them
A spam filter reads fun and ding instead of funding, and an AI tool obeys the hidden instructions
Human sees nothing odd
The reader sees only funding and ordinary text
- Spammers were found using it against AI email filters, which read a broken word where the recipient reads an ordinary one.
6 Sep 2026 · Prelims
Prompt injection
Before it reached spam, the same hiding place was aimed at AI systems rather than at the filters guarding a mailbox. What is hidden there is not a broken word but an instruction.
- Prompt injection was the technique's first use, the tag characters carrying instructions that an AI agent would read and obey.
Also filed elsewhere
- C-DOT quantum security products · on Quantum science and technology
A quantum computer able to break today's encryption does not exist yet, but traffic recorded today can be kept and read once one does.