A risk actor referred to as Hazy Hawk has been noticed hijacking deserted cloud sources of high-profile organizations, together with Amazon S3 buckets and Microsoft Azure endpoints, by leveraging misconfigurations within the Area Identify System (DNS) information.
The hijacked domains are then used to host URLs that direct customers to scams and malware through visitors distribution techniques (TDSes), in keeping with Infoblox. Among the different sources usurped by the risk actor embrace these hosted on Akamai, Bunny CDN, Cloudflare CDN, GitHub, and Netlify.
The DNS risk intelligence agency stated it first found the risk actor after it gained management of a number of sub-domains related to the U.S. Middle for Illness Management (CDC) in February 2025.
It has since been decided that different authorities businesses throughout the globe, outstanding universities, and worldwide firms similar to Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Younger have been victimized by the identical risk actor since at the least December 2023.
“Maybe essentially the most exceptional factor about Hazy Hawk is that these hard-to-discover, susceptible domains with ties to esteemed organizations usually are not getting used for espionage or ‘intellectual’ cybercrime,” Infoblox’s Jacques Portal and Renée Burton stated in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
“As a substitute, they feed into the seedy underworld of adtech, whisking victims to a variety of scams and pretend functions, and utilizing browser notifications to set off processes that can have a lingering impression.”
What makes Hazy Hawk’s operations noteworthy is the hijacking of trusted and respected domains belonging to reputable organizations, thus boosting their credibility in search outcomes when they’re getting used to serve malicious and spammy content material. However much more concerningly, the strategy allows the risk actors to bypass detection.
Underpinning the operation is the flexibility of the attackers to grab management of deserted domains with dangling DNS CNAME information, a method beforehand uncovered by Guardio in early 2024 as being exploited by unhealthy actors for spam proliferation and click on monetization. All a risk actor must do is register the lacking useful resource to hijack the area.
Hazy Hawk goes a step additional by discovering deserted cloud sources after which commandeering them for malicious functions. In some instances, the risk actor employs URL redirection strategies to hide which cloud useful resource was hijacked.
“We use the identify Hazy Hawk for this actor due to how they discover and hijack cloud sources which have dangling DNS CNAME information after which use them in malicious URL distribution,” Infoblox stated. “It is doable that the area hijacking element is supplied as a service and is utilized by a gaggle of actors.”
The assault chains typically contain cloning the content material of reputable websites for his or her preliminary website hosted on the hijacked domains, whereas luring victims into visiting them with pornographic or pirated content material. The positioning guests are then funneled through a TDS to find out the place they land subsequent.
“Hazy Hawk is without doubt one of the dozens of risk actors we monitor inside the promoting affiliate world,” the corporate stated. “Risk actors who belong to affiliate promoting applications drive customers into tailor-made malicious content material and are incentivized to incorporate requests to permit push notifications from ‘web sites’ alongside the redirection path.”
In doing so, the thought is to flood a sufferer’s system with push notifications and ship an limitless torrent of malicious content material, with every notification resulting in completely different scams, scareware, and pretend surveys, and accompanied by requests to permit extra push notifications.
To stop and defend towards Hazy Hawk actions, area house owners are advisable to take away a DNS CNAME document as quickly as a useful resource is shut down. Finish customers, then again, are suggested to disclaim notification requests from web sites they do not know.
“Whereas operators like Hazy Hawk are liable for the preliminary lure, the person who clicks is led right into a labyrinth of sketchy and outright malicious adtech. The truth that Hazy Hawk places appreciable effort into finding susceptible domains after which utilizing them for rip-off operations reveals that these promoting affiliate applications are profitable sufficient to pay effectively,” Infoblox stated.
