FBI director's Based Apparel site has been spotted hosting a 'ClickFix' attack

https://www.pcmag.com/news/kash-patels-apparel-site-is-trying-to-trick-visitors-into-installing-malware

by bilalq • 2 months ago

197 63 2 months ago

pcmag.com

NDlurker• 2 months ago

Thank you Based God

ray_v• 2 months ago

What next? The trump phone shipping Chinese malware. Unthinkable!

jmward01• 2 months ago

It wouldn't be Chinese. It would be Russian.

BoorishBears• 2 months ago

Patel's site was just dropping sauce: overdose of sauce

mjmas• 2 months ago

The attack suggests a hacker compromised some portion of BasedApparel.com

analogpixel• 2 months ago

For people that can't grok the title and the article like me:

- BasedApparel.com is a website owned by a person that happens to be the FBI director now. (he owned it before he became the director if it matters)

- The website BasedApparel.com was hacked and the hackers added a malicious click here to verify you are human section that tried to have you download a malicious payload if you were on macos.

bdcravens3• 2 months ago

he owned it before he became the director if it matters

All the more reason that those who "serve" in the government should be required to divest of their business interests. The traffic such a site would get due to the tribalism prevalent in US politics makes it a fat target, and potentially a national security threat.

wheelerwj• 2 months ago

Im a big fan of divesting in these scenarios but i dont know how that would help in this scenario specifically. His current role and his previous ownership made the site a target, but it would be a target regardless of who owns it currently.

abc123abc123• 2 months ago

This is not good. What it achieves, is that the quality of people who assume office sinks even lower than it is today, since anyone with a modicum of competence, would never divest a business for a low paid, public job.

On the other hand... you _do_ have a point here. Care must be taken to make sure that the persons business does not profit by the PR and media exposure related to the position they are taking.

I don't know how to do this. Maybe someone else runs their business at arms length? Maybe tracking the revenue and profit to catch sudden upward swings?

And adding to this, it should of course be completely illegal for politicians, US and other nations, to profit from insider trading.

morkalork• 2 months ago

happens to be

This is not normal, other (decent) countries are not like this

zombot3• 2 months ago

Sarcasm is hard to spot in raw text.

mzajc• 2 months ago

if you were on macos

Did they only target macOS? The article mentions macOS a lot, but AFAIK this attack changes the instructions based on the User-Agent. I've seen the exact page with instructions for Windows and PowerShell before.

gensym• 2 months ago

So it's not where you buy those shirts that say "Female Body Inspector?"

zombot3• 2 months ago

Has it been hacked? I mean, Trump's accomplices running conspicuous scams would not exactly be a surprise. They are all immune from prosecution, after all.

anigbrowl2• 2 months ago

Honestly, I can't think of a more deserving bunch of people than the owner and target customers of that website. Super genius people like that need entertaining challenges in their lives to perform at their peak.

Group_B• 2 months ago

And once again, another prime example that we do not live in a serious country

newscracker• 2 months ago

The attack seems to work by spanning various instructions that if run through macOS’s Terminal utility could steal stored credentials from Chromium-based browsers along with data from cryptocurrency wallets, placing them into a zip archive then sent to a hacker-controlled domain.

What is it about Chromium based browsers that this attack narrows down to? Is it something technical in the ease of stealing information or just the imagined market share by the attackers? As per Cloudflare’s statistics browser share on macOS [1], it seems like Google Chrome users are a little less than two thirds of the total user base. But Safari still holds one third of the user base. Ignoring Safari seems like a poor mistake.

[1] https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...

a_t48• 2 months ago

I wonder if they aren't using the macOS keychain, while Safari does.

breve• 2 months ago

Don't worry about it. Kick back and relax with some Kash Patel branded bourbon:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/kash-patel-fbi-...

You'll feel better in no time.

J-Kuhn• 2 months ago

Oh, I also got one: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:CreateAcc...

To protect the wiki against automated account creation, we kindly ask you to answer the question that appears below (more info): What is the output of: LC_ALL=C pacman -V|sed -r "s#[0-9]+#$(date -u +%m)#g"|base32|head -1

Wait, they really do that...

alright2565• 2 months ago

If you can't understand that command before pasting it in your terminal, then you probably shouldn't be editing the Arch Linux wiki.

PlasmaPower• 2 months ago

They have a similar command for the Arch Linux forum, where beginners are encouraged to ask questions

spockz• 2 months ago

My issue with this style of verification is more that it normalises running commands right in the terminal. Commands that come from place you kind of trust. And poof at some point it will contain some nefarious code. Instead of using a package manager (the curl to bash variant) or running these commands in a container/vm.

chrismorgan• 2 months ago

Also you need, to some extent, to understand that it’s something to execute in a terminal, because it doesn’t tell you that bit.

class4behavior• 2 months ago

Then write and highlight exactly that! ( e.g. "Never copy or execute code you do not understand! This is only for people who already know what will happen! Confirm:")

Forget about teaching people bad patterns. It's annoying when others assume everyone experiencing something under the same context and considers the same things as them.

rbobby• 2 months ago

The economy is so bad even the Director of the FBI has a side gig.

bdangubic• 2 months ago

President himself has several

Terr_• 2 months ago

"Look at the crimes the economy made me do" doesn't really work after a certain level of affluence though.

petesergeant• 2 months ago

I would like to see serious cross-party dialogue on how to avoid ending up in a situation where there’s an FBI director who sells meme clothing.

I don’t think it’s unfair to blame cowardice and venality of individual Republican politicians in the face of being primaried, although it definitely needs an asterisk that we don’t know that the left’s Senators and Congressmen would do any better under the same situation.

incidentist• 2 months ago

I would say it is up to republicans to do something about the clowns they appointed into high level office, and it’s up to democrats to continue their pattern of not appointing clowns like this into high level office.

swarnie• 2 months ago

Why does the FBI director have a merch store...?

iamkrazy2• 2 months ago

Would this be a news if it was not owned by FBI director? Do we really expect the FBI director to be responsible for this? He probably outsourced it to some company. This is an inflammatory headline.

toofy• 2 months ago

it’s absolutely news worthy.

we do (and absolutely should) have higher expectations of the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world. said organization that goes after malicious actors makes it even more newsworthy.

iamkrazy2• 2 months ago

Said organization has nothing to do with this e-commerce website.

josephcsible• 2 months ago

https://xkcd.com/932/

FBI director's Based Apparel site has been spotted hosting a 'ClickFix' attack

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