Topic
Social-engineering technique where a fake CAPTCHA or error prompt tricks users into pasting an attacker's command into Windows, running malware themselves.
Barracuda found CAPTCHA abuse in 43% of the phishing-kit attacks it examined during 2025. The check can keep automated scanners from reaching the next page, so a URL scan may inspect only the CAPTCHA.
Reality
CERT-UA says attackers planted fake Cloudflare checks on more than 100 legitimate websites to get visitors to install Lunex Stealer themselves. Ontinue says its browser components can keep file access after the stealer is deleted, so cleanup has to reach the browsers.
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Microsoft documented a ClickFix variant that stages its payload in the browser cache, keeping the command the victim pastes under Windows' 260-character Run limit. Detection moves to script engines reading browser profile folders, not the pasted text.
Reality
Huntress traced a RAT campaign that hides its first-stage lure in a ChatGPT Custom GPT on the real chatgpt.com, across at least 40 incidents. Because the page sits on a trusted domain, blocking the ClickFix PowerShell paste is the control that works.
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Huntress traced at least two of more than 40 ClickFix malware incidents to fake custom GPTs on OpenAI's chatgpt.com. On that route every hop before the PowerShell command sat on a Google or OpenAI address, so staff taught to trust familiar domains would click through each one.
Reality
Ontinue says the Lunex stealer-for-rent loads a flawed AMD driver, CVE-2023-20598, to switch off security tools before robbing seven browsers. That driver step is rarely used ahead of an info stealer, and Lunex is rented to multiple criminal groups.
Reality
Jamf Threat Labs says the Rust macOS stealer pastes itself in via Terminal, fakes an Installer password prompt, mutes the speakers, then hands the operator a headless clone of your logged-in profile.
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CTM360 tracked more than 17,000 compromised URLs serving a fake Cloudflare check whose next hostname arrives from an on-chain lookup. Microsoft put 47 percent of its 2025 initial-access cases down to the technique.
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Cato Networks says a sponsored ad outranked OpenAI's own page, sending macOS developers to a Google Sites portal whose ClickFix content lives on infrastructure Google never hosted.
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OX Security says the packages were never meant to infect anyone who installs them. Mirrored through unpkg, they serve attacker HTML from a domain most egress policies wave through.
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Hudson Rock and ADAMnetworks link the ads to an operation they call PasteSwitch, which hands Windows and macOS visitors different paste-this-command lures and swaps payloads on the backend depending on who arrives.
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Arctic Wolf Labs found injected iframes on real Ukrainian business sites showing a Ukrainian-language fake Cloudflare check that copies a Windows Installer command for the visitor to paste into Run. Its exposed panel logged 557 views.
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Blackpoint says a fake Spotify MSI, launched through msiexec.exe, ends with a Node.js agent that reads its live C2 address off a Polygon contract. The same implant has also shipped as Zoom and Teams.
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Kaspersky says a new MacSync variant hides its payload commands in public iCloud calendar events and downloads the next stage from iCloud. Both the instructions and the download ride trusted Apple domains, past defenses that block known-bad hosts.
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Sekoia's comparison found the two ClickFix services' injected scripts near identical, while the Exvicy subscription climbed from $1,200 to $2,000 a month and its panel count reached about 80 hosts by late August.
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Blackpoint's SOC worked an incident where a fake captcha on the victim company's own WordPress site ran a hidden PowerShell downloader, and the campaign's later stage sits in a blockchain contract no provider can pull.
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Huntress tracked nine months of malware campaigns run through shipped AI sharing features. Public Claude Artifacts, claude.ai/share links and indexable ChatGPT and Grok conversations all put the lure on a domain the victim already trusts.
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Zscaler's ThreatLabz found SloppyRAT in June 2026 at the end of a ClickFix chain whose live hosts are all ordinary domains, with a Polygon JSON-RPC lookup held in reserve for when those domains stop answering.
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Cisco Talos found the loader running from a WebDAV UNC path at a Ukrainian government organisation in April 2026, delivered by a ClickFix prompt whose JavaScript was stored on BNB Smart Chain. The primary payload is Amatera stealer.
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The contract cannot be deleted. Every injected site has to reach a public BNB Smart Chain testnet RPC endpoint to read it. Netskope recommends blocking that pool. The payload has already changed once.
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