Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeep
5 hours ago
- #Hazy Hawk scam
- #university subdomain hijacking
- #cybersecurity
- Scammers exploited poor record-keeping by university site administrators to hijack subdomains.
- Hijacked subdomains from prestigious universities like UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Washington University hosted explicit porn and malicious content, including scam sites.
- Hundreds of subdomains across at least 34 universities were affected, with thousands of hijacked pages appearing in Google search results.
- Scammers linked to the group Hazy Hawk targeted decommissioned subdomains that still had active CNAME records, leveraging universities' reputations for high search rankings.
- The incident highlights vulnerabilities in subdomain management and the risks of not removing outdated domain records.