Scofti
A neon-lit kiosk at night with a glowing sign, DOWNLOAD CLAUDE, and a small yellow Sponsored label on top. Behind the counter a grinning figure in an orange sunburst costume and a zip-up orange hoodie hands a blank slip to a customer in a grey hoodie, saying, "Take this. It's a simple copy and paste!" Off to the left the real toy with the orange sunburst head stands alone holding a small box and thinks, "I'd have told him to read it first."

Paste This

A Google ad for Claude led to Bing, then a hacked shop, then a fake Claude handing out the wrong command.

Someone on a Mac searched Google for Claude, and the first thing they saw was an ad.

  1. The ad. A Google search for "claude mac" shows a sponsored result whose listed address is bing.com (Push Security).

  2. Why it got through. "Google's ad review approved a destination that was simply another search engine," Push Security wrote (Push Security).

  3. The trip. The click goes through Google's ad link, then Bing's own link, then the hacked "about us" page of a homeopathy shop in South America, and lands on a copy of Claude's download page (Push Security).

  4. The hiding. Both sites check where a visitor came from. Go to the fake page directly and you get a "page not found" (Push Security).

  5. The copy button. The page shows Anthropic's real install command. Its Copy button puts a different one on your clipboard. Pasted into Terminal, it prints "Downloading Claude" with Claude's real address, then pulls a script from someone else's server and runs it. The write-up does not say what that script does (Push Security).

  6. October 9. Push Security publishes all of this. It says 4 in 5 of the attacks of this kind that it catches reach people through search engines. That is its own count, from the attacks its product detects (Push Security).

  7. October 17. "We've suspended the advertiser accounts running the reported campaign," a Google spokesperson said (Fox News).

Claude for Mac comes from claude.com/download, not from an ad.

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