FBI director's Based Apparel site has been spotted hosting a 'ClickFix' attack
An apparel site co-created by FBI director Kash Patel has been found attempting to deceive macOS users into installing malware. The site, BasedApparel.com, employs a Clickfix-style attack that tricks users into executing a malicious command. Security researchers have indicated that this attack may involve compromised elements of the website.
- ▪BasedApparel.com is associated with FBI director Kash Patel and co-created with Andrew Ollis.
- ▪The site has been reported to host a Clickfix-style attack targeting macOS users.
- ▪Users are misled into running a malicious command through a fake Cloudflare verification page.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | PCMAG |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/kash-patels-apparel-site-is-trying-to-trick-visitors-into-installing-malware |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 00:34:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T22:41:35.970Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T00:59:58.915Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2juxv8mwSB-1 · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An apparel site from FBI director Kash Patel has been spotted trying to trick macOS users into installing malware. The site, BasedApparel.com, is part of a merchandise brand that Patel co-created with Andrew Ollis prior to becoming FBI director under the Trump administration. On Thursday, a user based in Portugal spotted the online shop hosting a “Clickfix” style attack that tries to dupe unsuspecting users into running a malicious command on their Mac computers. The attack seems to work as the user visits BasedApparel.com; a victim will encounter the site showing a page pretending to come from Cloudflare, which powers “Verify you are human” CAPTCHA tests and offers DDoS protection.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMAG.
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