An ad blocker would have stopped this, which is why it is a matter of cybersecurity best practices to always employ a proper ad blocker.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Wow, grabbing a base64 obfuscated URL with curl sending the output to bash is a huge red flag. I guess Mac users must not know anything about the CLI.
Never pipe the output of curl or wget to bash. You can't inspect whatever it downloads before it gets run. If the URL is obfuscated, there is basically a 100% chance that it's malicious.
Can't imagine why you think that's exclusive to Mac users. Basically no one knows how computers work
So many legit installers prefer this tho
If you know what curl is, you’re not the target audience.
The people this is targeting don’t even know what ‘CLI’ stands for, but they absolutely will copy/paste random commands into their computer if they’re told it’ll magically fix something.
I get really weird feelings when I run brew .....
I bet they’re hoping dumb LLMs read it and spit it back out.