A menace actor often called Hazy Hawk has been noticed hijacking deserted cloud assets of high-profile organizations, together with Amazon S3 buckets and Microsoft Azure endpoints, by leveraging misconfigurations within the Area Title System (DNS) data.
The hijacked domains are then used to host URLs that direct customers to scams and malware by way of site visitors distribution techniques (TDSes), in response to Infoblox. A number of the different assets usurped by the menace actor embody these hosted on Akamai, Bunny CDN, Cloudflare CDN, GitHub, and Netlify.
The DNS menace intelligence agency mentioned it first found the menace actor after it gained management of a number of sub-domains related to the U.S. Heart for Illness Management (CDC) in February 2025.
It has since been decided that different authorities companies throughout the globe, distinguished universities, and worldwide firms corresponding to Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Younger have been victimized by the identical menace actor since a minimum of 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 mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
“As an alternative, they feed into the seedy underworld of adtech, whisking victims to a variety of scams and pretend purposes, and utilizing browser notifications to set off processes that may 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 method allows the menace actors to bypass detection.
Underpinning the operation is the flexibility of the attackers to grab management of deserted domains with dangling DNS CNAME data, a method beforehand uncovered by Guardio in early 2024 as being exploited by unhealthy actors for spam proliferation and click on monetization. All a menace actor must do is register the lacking useful resource to hijack the area.
Hazy Hawk goes a step additional by discovering deserted cloud assets after which commandeering them for malicious functions. In some circumstances, the menace actor employs URL redirection methods 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 assets which have dangling DNS CNAME data after which use them in malicious URL distribution,” Infoblox mentioned. “It is potential that the area hijacking element is supplied as a service and is utilized by a gaggle of actors.”
The assault chains usually contain cloning the content material of reputable websites for his or her preliminary web site hosted on the hijacked domains, whereas luring victims into visiting them with pornographic or pirated content material. The location guests are then funneled by way of a TDS to find out the place they land subsequent.
“Hazy Hawk is without doubt one of the dozens of menace actors we monitor inside the promoting affiliate world,” the corporate mentioned. “Menace 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 shield in opposition to Hazy Hawk actions, area homeowners are really helpful to take away a DNS CNAME report as quickly as a useful resource is shut down. Finish customers, alternatively, are suggested to disclaim notification requests from web sites they do not know.
“Whereas operators like Hazy Hawk are answerable for the preliminary lure, the consumer 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 exhibits that these promoting affiliate applications are profitable sufficient to pay nicely,” Infoblox mentioned.
