HBO Max Reddit account compromised to serve ClickFix attacks
The streaming service does not offer a native client for the Mac.Anyone who clicked on the malicious ad would then be taken to a “somewhat-legitimate” looking landing page (hbomaxx[.]us) that includes a join/download button. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Clicking the button produced instructions telling the user to copy and paste a command into Terminal on macOS. “My guess is that the Reddit account is compromised,” they concluded.Three days later, Reddit paused the infostealer-dropping ads, and an admin said the social media platform’s safety and security teams were investigating what happened.HBO Max’s parent company Warner Bros.
- ▪The streaming service does not offer a native client for the Mac.Anyone who clicked on the malicious ad would then be taken to a “somewhat-legitimate” looking landing page (hbomaxx[.]us) that includes a join/download button.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); Clicking the button produced instructions telling the user to copy and paste a command into Terminal on macOS.
- ▪“My guess is that the Reddit account is compromised,” they concluded.Three days later, Reddit paused the infostealer-dropping ads, and an admin said the social media platform’s safety and security teams were investigating what happened.HBO
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 4 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/09/14/hbo-max-reddit-account-compromised-to-serve-clickfix-attacks/5296408 |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:43:01 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T01:16:51.506Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T01:16:51.506Z |
| 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 | HDSmS0eLjUp7 · 2 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
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); cyber-crime HBO Max Reddit account compromised to serve ClickFix attacks Part of a 'massive 48-hour malvertising blitz' targeting macOS and Windows machines with malware Jessica Lyons Jessica Lyons Cybersecurity Editor Published mon 14 Sep 2026 // 23:43 UTC READ MORE New hardware device can RAM into encrypted memory, expose your data 4 hours ago OpenAI's malicious bot swarm attacked RubyGems 4 hours ago Perfect-10 GitLab bug under attack days after patch lands 8 hours ago UK.gov begins…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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