Hackers are Using reCAPTCHA to Infect Computers; FBI Warns iPhone and Android Users to Delete Texts; Giant, Unblockable Ads Coming to Windows Copilot… and more!
Every day, we scan the tech world for interesting news, sometimes from outside the tech world. Every Thursday, we feature news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week’s ‘Thursday Newsbytes’ informative and interesting!
Getting verified on these sites will leave your PC with a nasty malware infection
Proving you’re not a robot online can be really annoying, but now it can also be quite dangerous as hackers have devised a new way to use seemingly harmless CAPTCHAs in their attacks.
A Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (or a CAPTCHA for short) is a security measure you’ve likely come across countless times online. Websites use these tests to determine if you’re an actual human user or a bot sent to crawl a particular page.
By typing out the letters you see in a picture, the website is able to verify that you are actually human. You may have also come across a reCAPTCHA before, which is an evolution of the traditional CAPTCHA that has you do something like pick out which images in a grid contain bicycles.
Now, hackers have come up with a new way to weaponize reCAPTCHAs to hijack your computer’s clipboard and get you to install info-stealing malware on your own PC. Here’s everything you need to know about this new verification attack…
FBI Warning—Delete These Texts On Your iPhone, Android Phone
The FBI warns a threat moving across America “from state to state” targets citizens via malicious SMS (smishing) texts, teling iPhone, Android users to “delete any smishing texts received.” Now cybercriminals have registered “over 10,000 domains” to fuel a new wave of attacks. These new texts are easy to detect — delete them right away.
The new report comes via Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. The new campaign, it says, “entices users to reveal personal and/or financial information, including credit or debit card and account information.” The original threat focuses on toll scams, with state-specific payment links; the new set of domains adds delivery services into the mix.
The toll scam has been generating headlines in recent months, with rarely a week passing by without a new report from state or local media somewhere in America. The FTC warns that “not only is the scammer trying to steal your money…
Giant, AI ads are coming to Windows Copilot. Thanks, Microsoft
Is this the future? Massive, unblockable ads within AI feeds? Count us out.
For years, Windows users have complained about “ads” touting Microsoft services, showing up in various places. Now the alarm bells should be seriously ringing: Microsoft has publicly disclosed plans for monstrous ads within Copilot, as well as a roadmap to what appears to be AI-driven advertising, too.
Last week, Microsoft’s advertising blog outlined what it called the “future of audience engagement.” And you already know what that is: AI. Microsoft believes that not only will generative AI provide a more natural interface for users to shop, but agents will assist them. It gets worse: Brands may even deploy their own agent AI, too.
“We are committed to helping brands create agents and making it easy to connect them to our audiences,” Microsoft wrote, via Windows Central. “As the first step in this journey, we are launching a pilot product that enables brands to create smart, AI-based agents on their websites.”
“Imagine if a website could talk?” Microsoft suggested…
Microsoft patches an ‘extraordinary’ number of zero-day security vulnerabilities
Today is a good day to make sure your Windows 10 and 11 machines are up to date, as Microsoft has released a hefty new security update for a number of zero-day vulnerabilities. The patch, part of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update, contains fixes for Windows Server as well and include patches for six vulnerabilities which have already been exploited plus six more critical issues.
The new update addresses security issues of a hefty seven zero-days, including flaws which can enable remote code execution, in which an attacker can run code on the victim’s system. One of these vulnerabilities requires the attacker to first trick a local user into taking some specific actions like mounting a malicious virtual hard disk image, and has already been taken advantage of my some hackers. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-24993, is marked as a severity 7.8 by Microsoft so it’s important to patch to protect against it….
Windows 10 security risks are now more of a reality for users
It appears more and more Windows 10 users may be finally ready to let go of the legacy operating system ahead of the end of its life status on October 14. Microsoft has been urging system users to update to the latest Windows 11 software before that date and after months of ignoring the call, tens of millions of users are now opting in to the update.
Figures from StatCounter indicate that the percentage of Windows 10 usage has now dipped below 60% for the first time with 58.7% of global users running the system as of February 2025. Meanwhile, stats for Windows 11 are slowly creeping up toward 40% with 38.2% of global users running this version of Microsoft’s OS.
Notably, StatCounter doesn’t account for exactly how users transition from one software version to another. Previous research has shown that businesses, in particular, were updating to Windows 11 when they replaced hardware, as opposed to upgrading systems from Windows 11– despite having PCs with the minimum requirements to upgrade to the latest operating system…
Thanks for reading this week’s Thursday Newbytes. We hope these articles were informative, interesting, fun, and helpful.
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