Zero-Width Characters: Invisibly fingerprinting text
Journalists watch out—you may be unintentionally revealing sources.
Countermeasures for journalists or others engaged with leakers, in decreasing order of effectiveness:
- Avoid releasing excerpts and raw documents.
- Get the same documents from multiple leakers to ensure they have the exact same content on a byte-by-byte level.
- Manually retype excerpts to avoid invisible characters and homoglyphs.
- Keep excerpts short to limit the amount of information shared.
- Use a tool that strips non-whitelisted characters from text before sharing it with others.