Cybercriminals have recently revamped the ClickFix attack scheme by deploying a highly convincing fake Windows Update screen within a full-screen browser tab. Instead of the older human verification prompts, this newer lure leads victims to believe their system needs a critical update. Once the fake update completes, users are instructed to press Win+R (opening the Run dialog), paste a pre-copied command (automatically placed on their clipboard via JavaScript), and run it unwittingly launching the infection. Technically, the attack chain starts with mshta.exe, a built-in Windows binary, to execute malicious JavaScript. That script in turn invokes PowerShell and launches a [.]NET loader, known as a Stego Loader. The loader contains a PNG image, where the real malicious payload is hidden using steganography by encoding shellcode within specific color channels of the image. Once reconstructed in memory, the shellcode is unpacked using the Donut tool, enabling execution of [.]NET, DLL, or EXE payloads without writing to disk. The final payloads observed in recent attacks are LummaC2 and Rhadamanthys, both powerful info-stealing malware. This evolution of ClickFix is particularly worrying because it combines social engineering sophistication with strong technical evasion. By hiding code in image pixels and running everything in memory, it becomes much harder for traditional antivirus to detect. To defend against such attacks, security teams are advised to disable or restrict use of the Windows Run dialog, monitor for unusual process chains, and check the RunMRU registry entries for suspicious commands.
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