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. The latest trend involves the use of an obscure character called the soft. hyphen or SHY character to obscure malicious. URLs in spam messages in recent spam messages, researchers at Symantec Corp. say. The soft hyphens are represented by HTML equivalent character .. and rendered by a graphic symbol that s identical to a standard hyphen (-)
Source: https://threatpost.com/spammers-using-shy-character-hide-malicious-urls-100710/74558/