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
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).
Trump is currently quite mad at Putin because Putin refused to accept Trump's terms. They are not friends, and never have been. Meanwhile, there's another foreign leader that Trump has decided to start a war on behalf of—but the leadership of the other American party loves that foreign leader just as much as Trump does, so their loyal media outlets downplay it and distract with the fake Russia nonsense.
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.
This is not good. What it achieves, is that the quality of people who assume office sinks even lower than it is today, since anyone with a modicum of competence, would never divest a business for a low paid, public job.
On the other hand... you _do_ have a point here. Care must be taken to make sure that the persons business does not profit by the PR and media exposure related to the position they are taking.
I don't know how to do this. Maybe someone else runs their business at arms length? Maybe tracking the revenue and profit to catch sudden upward swings?
And adding to this, it should of course be completely illegal for politicians, US and other nations, to profit from insider trading.
I disagree. I think the caliber of public employee, and their integrity, would be much higher if they were "only" allowed to collect their salary.
No state employee would be allowed to run a business like this while employed where I live (sapphire-blue New England state FWIW). Government positions are fairly, but not extravagantly, compensated, prestigious and come with excellent benefits. They should not be an avenue for accumulation of riches. It clearly does not work well and we're not getting the country's best.
The person should also work for minimum wage, since that is a sign that the welfare of the community is more important than the employee's own. Perhaps weekly self immolation sessions would take that up a notch? What about divesting one's family because they might take attention away from important government work?
The roughly $200k/year that department heads, congress, etc get is hardly minimum wage. No one is even suggesting they should lose the assets they've built up, just that they shouldn't be allowed to own a business while serving the public.
I’m not a CPA, but aren’t there plenty of legal ways to divest in a business where you’re not directly involved, but where you can still get a share of any profits?
I think there should probably be a level at which those requirements kick in, but keep in mind that most of the jobs we're talking about pay around $200k/year, with many of the daily and life expenses included as benefits, pushing the equivalent salary even higher.
It's not like they lose their money or lose the ability to invest their pre-public money. They could sell their business interests, then take the proceeds and put the money into a broad market fund (to prevent company- or industry-specific conflicts of interest). I'd even suggest making them exempt from capital gains should they choose to sell.
> What it achieves, is that the quality of people who assume office sinks even lower than it is today, since anyone with a modicum of competence, would never divest a business for a low paid, public job.
Unless of course those with a modicum of competence desire to be true public servants. Read about the character of some of our great leaders like Washington, Lincoln or Eisenhower to understand the mentality of a true public servant. Something someone like Kash Patel knows nothing about.
I don’t think this level of virtue is all that rare, though it is rarely rewarded at the ballot box.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Then write and highlight exactly that! ( e.g. "Never copy or execute code you do not understand! This is only for people who already know what will happen! Confirm:")
Forget about teaching people bad patterns. It's annoying when others assume everyone experiencing something under the same context and considers the same things as them.
To be fair, just because you understand the code you see doesn't mean its safe to copy-paste. Many of these compromised sites will show something that appears to be a benign command but will be something entirely different when you copy them.
Not good to get people into the habit of copying and running code in their terminal.
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.
I would say it is up to republicans to do something about the clowns they appointed into high level office, and it’s up to democrats to continue their pattern of not appointing clowns like this into high level office.
Would this be a news if it was not owned by FBI director? Do we really expect the FBI director to be responsible for this? He probably outsourced it to some company. This is an inflammatory headline.
we do (and absolutely should) have higher expectations of the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world. said organization that goes after malicious actors makes it even more newsworthy.
NDlurker | 18 hours ago
ray_v | 18 hours ago
jmward01 | 17 hours ago
wmf | 17 hours ago
dylan604 | 17 hours ago
anigbrowl | 13 hours ago
kibwen | 17 hours ago
Paracompact | 9 hours ago
Georgelemental | 16 hours ago
dralley | 16 hours ago
Georgelemental | 5 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | 15 hours ago
I think Hilary Clinton is a terrible human being, but props on her play there. Truly both sad and insanely effective.
tdeck | 15 hours ago
zombot | 15 hours ago
BoorishBears | 16 hours ago
mjmas | 18 hours ago
analogpixel | 18 hours ago
- 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.
bdcravens | 17 hours ago
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.
wheelerwj | 14 hours ago
Nevermark | 12 hours ago
> 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.
abc123abc123 | 8 hours ago
On the other hand... you _do_ have a point here. Care must be taken to make sure that the persons business does not profit by the PR and media exposure related to the position they are taking.
I don't know how to do this. Maybe someone else runs their business at arms length? Maybe tracking the revenue and profit to catch sudden upward swings?
And adding to this, it should of course be completely illegal for politicians, US and other nations, to profit from insider trading.
compass_copium | 8 hours ago
No state employee would be allowed to run a business like this while employed where I live (sapphire-blue New England state FWIW). Government positions are fairly, but not extravagantly, compensated, prestigious and come with excellent benefits. They should not be an avenue for accumulation of riches. It clearly does not work well and we're not getting the country's best.
yostrovs | 4 hours ago
mikestew | 4 hours ago
bdcravens | 3 hours ago
etothet | 4 hours ago
compass_copium | 3 hours ago
"Hey Ka$h, can we have a quick discussion about my federal racketeering case? Btw I just purchased 10000 $40 shirts from your store to give away."
bdcravens | 3 hours ago
I think there should probably be a level at which those requirements kick in, but keep in mind that most of the jobs we're talking about pay around $200k/year, with many of the daily and life expenses included as benefits, pushing the equivalent salary even higher.
It's not like they lose their money or lose the ability to invest their pre-public money. They could sell their business interests, then take the proceeds and put the money into a broad market fund (to prevent company- or industry-specific conflicts of interest). I'd even suggest making them exempt from capital gains should they choose to sell.
jaredklewis | an hour ago
Unless of course those with a modicum of competence desire to be true public servants. Read about the character of some of our great leaders like Washington, Lincoln or Eisenhower to understand the mentality of a true public servant. Something someone like Kash Patel knows nothing about.
I don’t think this level of virtue is all that rare, though it is rarely rewarded at the ballot box.
morkalork | 17 hours ago
This is not normal, other (decent) countries are not like this
zombot | 15 hours ago
mzajc | 17 hours ago
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.
gensym | 16 hours ago
zombot | 15 hours ago
anigbrowl | 13 hours ago
Group_B | 17 hours ago
newscracker | 16 hours ago
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...
a_t48 | 12 hours ago
breve | 15 hours ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/kash-patel-fbi-...
You'll feel better in no time.
J-Kuhn | 15 hours ago
> 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...
alright2565 | 15 hours ago
PlasmaPower | 14 hours ago
spockz | 13 hours ago
stavros | 10 hours ago
jampekka | 7 hours ago
chrismorgan | 11 hours ago
class4behavior | 9 hours ago
Forget about teaching people bad patterns. It's annoying when others assume everyone experiencing something under the same context and considers the same things as them.
scratchyone | 2 hours ago
Not good to get people into the habit of copying and running code in their terminal.
rbobby | 13 hours ago
bdangubic | 8 hours ago
petesergeant | 12 hours ago
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.
incidentist | an hour ago
swarnie | 12 hours ago
iamkrazy | 11 hours ago
toofy | 11 hours ago
we do (and absolutely should) have higher expectations of the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world. said organization that goes after malicious actors makes it even more newsworthy.
iamkrazy | 11 hours ago
golem14 | 10 hours ago
I wouldn't hire a doctor either that has food poisoning every two weeks.
I wouldn't hire a security guard that gets held up often.
Paracompact | 9 hours ago
josephcsible | 4 hours ago