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.
> 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.
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.
It is the mix of high-security high-visibility national impact with organizations that are completely unequipped to operate in that arena.
> it would be a target regardless of who owns it currently.
The commonality of attacks makes it more important to eliminate distracting dependencies for critical leaders. Not less.
There is a reason top security clearances have requirements no normal organization could make on their employers. Lack of loose vectors is even more important for leaders.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
The existence of other influences does not diminish the fact that Trump is enamored with Putin (and most "strong man" dictators generally, but Putin in particular) and it does impact his foreign policy decisions and those of his administration (Hegseth straight up canceled weapons shipments to Ukraine for 2 weeks in the aftermath of the Oval Office meeting thinking it would please the boss).
To what point? Do we actually think Trump would use a Trump phone? Otherwise, they'd just be getting data on die hard MAGA types that have nothing to do with anything juicy
- 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.
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.
> it would be a target regardless of who owns it currently.
The commonality of attacks makes it more important to eliminate distracting dependencies for critical leaders. Not less.
There is a reason top security clearances have requirements no normal organization could make on their employers. Lack of loose vectors is even more important for leaders.
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.
This is not normal, other (decent) countries are not like this
> 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...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/kash-patel-fbi-...
You'll feel better in no time.
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...
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.
I think Hilary Clinton is a terrible human being, but props on her play there. Truly both sad and insanely effective.