Fake Captcha Exploits Trusted Web Infrastructure to Distribute Malware

**Executive summary:** Researchers analyzed ~9,500 web assets using Fake Captcha and ClickFix lures and found a visually uniform but behaviorally fragmented ecosystem that delivers malware via VBScript, PowerShell (including obfuscated variants), MSI installers, and browser-mediated channels; the study highlights widespread abuse of trusted verification interfaces, provides extraction of execution behaviors and infrastructure indicators, and recommends layered defenses including monitoring of UI abuse, correlating interface presence with network behavior, user training, and threat-intel blocking.