Search Engine Roundtable

Google Does Crawl & Index UTF-8 Encoded URLs

A Google Groups thread asks if Google can crawl and index UTF-8 encoded URLs. The quick answer is yes, Google can crawl and index these URLs. Google's JohnMu provided a link to the Google search ...
Dark Reading

Threat Actors Ramp Up Use of Encoded URLs to Bypass Secure Email

Secure email gateways (SEG) do a lot to protect organizations from malware, spam, and phishing email. For some threat actors though, they also offer an attractive option for sneaking malicious mail ...
Threat Post

Phish Uses Google’s URL Decoding to Swim Past Defenses

Percentage-based URL encoding plus Google domain trickery is helping malicious emails to evade filters. A phishing campaign that takes advantage of Google’s ability to decode non-ASCII URL data on the ...
Bleeping Computer

Microsoft Phishing Attack Uses Google Redirects to Evade Detection

A new phishing campaign uses Google search query redirects to send potential victims to a phishing landing page designed to collect Microsoft Office 365 credentials via encoded URLs. The phishers ...
Ars Technica

Encoding characters in urls

I am trying to figure out how IE determines what characters to encode in a URL. <BR>Ex. If I do a search on Google for 2:00 it becomes &q=2%3A00<BR><BR>How does Internet Explorer figure out to use %3A ...