Beware of new, AI made fake CAPTCHA pages

marketing14560
Oct 3, 2025
2 min read

Happy Friday I don't know about you, but those "I am not a robot" and "pick the squares with a bridge in them" challenges still drive me nuts after all these years. Those are called CAPTCHAs and the acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. They're designed differentiate between real users and automated users, such as bots.

According to Trend Micro, there's been a surge in AI generated CAPTCHA challenge websites since January, all designed exclusively for the purpose of being entry points for criminal phishing campaigns.

So how does this work?

You might get an email with an urgent message such as "Password Reset Required” or “USPS Change of Address Notification." Clicking the link will take you to what appears to be a harmless CAPTCHA verification page. But... why do this?

1) It delays suspicion. By giving you a CAPTCHA challenge first, you're far less likely to recognize the page as malicious and you'll lower your guard a bit.

2) Detection evasion. Automated scanners patrolling the page will only see a CAPTCHA challenge, not the underlying, hidden credential-harvesting form. This greatly cuts down the likelihood of the site being flagged as malicious.

It's all psychology and robots here.

The Takeaway

If you successfully complete the CAPTCHA you'll be given any number of fake login pages to a Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or banking account. These guys just want to harvest your username and password.

Remember that these fake CAPTCHA pages are building trust. You'll probably assume that you're completing a routine verification step, will lower your guard and thus make you more likely to complete the fake login page. Worse yet, tech won't help you. Crawlers and scanners often overlook the hidden phishing redirect or login page code. So, it's going to be up to old-fashion common sense to keep you safe from this one.

Be sure that your employees are educated on how to spot CAPTCHA-based phishing attempts. This includes educating them on how to verify URLs before interacting with CAPTCHAs, use a password manager (which won’t autofill on phishing sites), and report suspicious pages.

Need some guidance on how to get some of these things rolled out at your organization? Feel free to reach out - we can help.

Stay safe out there

-Attila

New Positivity Box!

A trans-national operation involving 14 African countries has taken down a large-scale digital scamming network, leading to 260 arrests and the seizure of 1235 electronic devices.

The Interpol-led effort, named Operation Contender 3.0, marks the third wave of arrests against fraudsters and romance scammers in Africa, where perpetrators build online relationships to extract money from victims, and [s]extortion, in which victims are blackmailed with explicit images or videos. Thank you Interpol for stopping these criminals.

New Friday Funnies!