There are several malicious fake updates campaigns being run across thousands of compromised websites. Here I will walk through one with a pattern that doesn’t match with others I’ve been tracking. This campaign appears to have started around July 19th, 2023. Based on a search on PublicWWW of the injection base64 there are at least 434 infected sites.

I’m calling this one ClearFake until I see a previously used name for it. The name is a reference to the majority of the Javascript being used without obfuscation. I say majority because base64 is used three times. That’s it. All the variable names are in the clear, no obfuscation on them.

One noticeable difference from SocGholish is that there appears to be no tracking of visits by IP or cookies. As an analyst you can you go back to the compromised site over and over coming from the same IP and not clearing your browser cache. This also means the site owner is more likely to see the infection as well.