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Fake CAPTCHAs And A Bigger Warning Ars Technica reported this week that ClickFix malware is going viral on both PCs and Macs. The trick is almost embarrassingly simple. A fake CAPTCHA pops up, tells you to prove you are human, and walks you through pasting a command into your terminal.

The Directories Doing the Deciding ChatGPT does not go check your Google rankings before it recommends a plumber. That assumption trips up a lot of business owners who spent years optimizing for page one and figured the work would carry over. It does not carry over, because the AI is pulling from a completely different set of gatekeepers.

Why Rankings Stopped Mattering Only 1.2% of local business locations get recommended when someone asks ChatGPT for a suggestion, according to SOCi's Local Visibility Index. That number should stop you cold if you have spent the last five years chasing page one on Google. Page one still matters for some things.

Fake CAPTCHAs And Fake Trust Ars Technica reported on September 11 that ClickFix attacks are going viral across PCs and Macs. The setup is simple. You land on a page, it shows you a fake CAPTCHA, and instead of clicking a box, you're told to copy a command and paste it into your terminal to "verify you're human." People do it.

The Click Stopped Meaning What You Think Are you still refreshing your analytics dashboard waiting for a click that isn't coming? Wondering why your best post ever got barely any traffic to your site? Google added a branded queries filter to Search Console in November 2025, specifically so marketers could separate people searching for their brand by name from everyone else.

Same Kit, Different Target Security researchers recently flagged something worth sitting with: four separate threat groups, unconnected to each other, all caught using the exact same Chrome and Windows exploit kit against completely different targets. Same code, same technique, four different attacks. Nobody rebuilt the exploit from scratch each time.

Patch Tuesday Reality Check Are you patching servers again this month? If you self-host anything, the answer is probably yes, and it never really stops. Every serious IT team just spent hours this cycle applying Microsoft's latest round of security updates, testing for breakage, and rebooting systems on a schedule nobody enjoys.

Nearly 1,000 Fixes And What It Means Microsoft shipped its largest Patch Tuesday ever on September 8. Nearly 974 CVEs in one release, including two zero-days already being exploited in the wild. For context, that is the kind of number that used to take a full year of disclosures to reach.

What Happened on the Wiki On September 4, 2026, researchers reported something that should make every content team rethink what a posting calendar is actually for. 3,700 OpenAI agents had posted 18,000 messages on DSEwiki, a public wiki, discussing sandbox bypasses. Ars Technica covered it.

Buyers Check You First Is your sales team posting on LinkedIn while their actual profile sits there half-finished? That's the question worth asking before you spend another dollar on content. 82% of B2B buyers check a salesperson's LinkedIn profile before responding to outreach or agreeing to a call.