HBO Max's Reddit Account Was Hijacked to Spread Malware
A hacker hijacked an HBO Max-focused account on Reddit to trick users into installing malware that can infect Windows PCs and Macs. The hacker circulated 46 official-looking but fake ads via the u/hbomax account, according to security researchers at Hudson Rock and Adam Networks. Some of the ads promoted a fraudulent desktop app for the streaming service.
- ▪A hacker hijacked an HBO Max-focused account on Reddit to trick users into installing malware that can infect Windows PCs and Macs.
- ▪The hacker circulated 46 official-looking but fake ads via the u/hbomax account, according to security researchers at Hudson Rock and Adam Networks.
- ▪Some of the ads promoted a fraudulent desktop app for the streaming service.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/hbo-maxs-reddit-account-was-hijacked-to-spread-malware |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 26 21:05:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T21:16:51.521Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T21:16:51.521Z |
| 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 · 1 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 |
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| 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
A hacker hijacked an HBO Max-focused account on Reddit to trick users into installing malware that can infect Windows PCs and Macs. The hacker circulated 46 official-looking but fake ads via the u/hbomax account, according to security researchers at Hudson Rock and Adam Networks. Some of the ads promoted a fraudulent desktop app for the streaming service. A user on Reddit first flagged the threat earlier this month after noticing that many of the ads led to a fake domain at hbomaxx[.]us. The site was offering three months of free HBO Max for downloading HBO on macOS. However, clicking the offer triggered a ClickFix-style attack, or a list of seemingly harmless instructions to perform on a Windows PC or Mac.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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