It was supposed to be a regular day. I opened my browser, navigated to one of my web projects, and was greeted by something that immediately triggered my infosec paranoia: a reCAPTCHA verification prompt.
Wait a minute, I thought. This site is built entirely on Astro.
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For the uninitiated, Astro is a Static Site Generator (SSG). It spits out highly optimized, pure HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript. There is no backend rendering on the fly, no database to inject into, and absolutely no native reCAPTCHA integrated into this specific build. Seeing a dynamic, interactive “security” prompt on a purely static page is like finding a working television in the middle of the Jurassic period. It simply shouldn’t be there.
So, where was this payload coming from? The answer lay not in the server, but in the delivery. I was looking at a textbook Edge Infrastructure compromise.
Here is a detailed of how my Cloudflare account was weaponized to serve a Living-off-the-Land (LotL) Pastejacking attack, and how I nuked it from orbit.