How do soft hyphens obfuscate URLs?

Question

I just got a piece of spam with the hyperlink obscured with soft hyphens. Since I don't actually want to click on the link, how do the soft hyphens create the URL obfuscation?

For example, how would I use soft hyphens to obfuscate http://www.google.com/ ?

Answer 1

There is an entire page of Symantec about it: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/soft-hyphen-new-url-obfuscation-technique but I wasn't able to test it because Chrome and IE 9.0 show them. The trick is

­

Now look at this:

http://www.my­site.com;

In the DNS it is www.my(soft hypens)site.com, but to the user it's http://www.my­site.com (look at the source of this responce if you can using the edit link)