/ ANNOUNCEMENT — MAR 18, 2026

We’re shipping look-alike SSID detection.

A network name spelled with a Cyrillic letter — or an invisible character — can render identical to yours. Now the app reads the bytes, not the pixels.

Our fourth detector goes after the lure itself: homoglyph SSID detection. It catches network names spelled with confusable or invisible Unicode characters — the ones that render pixel-identical to a name you trust — on Windows, free.

Same pixels, different bytes. The eye sees one network; the computer sees two.
/ WHY IT MATTERS

A lure that passes a human glance

A homoglyph SSID is a network whose name looks identical to one you trust but is spelled with different characters — a Cyrillic “а” for a Latin “a,” for instance. Paired with an evil-twin access point, it’s a powerful lure: the name passes a glance, and a distracted user connects.

YOUR NETWORK
C
i
t
y
C
a
f
e
BROADCASTING NEARBY
C
i
t
y
C
а
f
e
U+0430
Cyrillic а
SSID LOOK-ALIKEsame pixels, different bytes — one letter isn't Latin
/ THE HARD VARIANT

Characters that render as nothing

The subtlest version uses invisible characters — a zero-width space spliced into a trusted name renders as nothing, so the SSID looks byte-for-byte identical while being a different string underneath. No human eye, and most software, would ever catch it.

AS DISPLAYED
H
o
m
e
_
W
i
F
i
ACTUAL BYTES
H
o
m
e
_
U+200B
W
i
F
i
A zero-width space renders as nothing — invisible to your eye, but a completely different network name to the computer.
INVISIBLE CHARACTERSsome look-alike tricks use characters that render as nothing at all
/ WHAT SHIPPED

Canonical comparison, not pixels

The detector reduces every nearby network name to a canonical comparison key: it drops invisible and zero-width characters, normalizes the text, strips combining marks, maps every Unicode digit to ASCII, and applies a curated confusables table. When two networks produce the same key but have different raw characters, that’s a look-alike — flagged as a medium-severity alert. It deliberately does not case-fold, because SSIDs are case-sensitive and a capitalization difference isn’t an attack.

NETWORK ACityCafe
NETWORK BCityCаfe
REDUCE
zero-width · marks · digits · confusables
KEY citycafe
SAME KEY · DIFFERENT BYTES → MEDIUM
CANONICAL KEYdifferent bytes that reduce to the same key are the tell
/ THE PRICE

Detection is free

Look-alike SSID detection ships in the free version and always will. Being warned that an impostor of your network is broadcasting nearby — before you tap connect — is exactly the kind of awareness that shouldn’t be paywalled.

FREE FOREVERLook-alike SSID detection is free, for Windows.

Read more: how look-alike SSIDs work · how to spot a fake WiFi name · the evil-twin detector

Read the bytes, not the pixels.
Detection is free.