Abandoned Subdomains from Major Institutions Hijacked for AI-Generated Spam

A coordinated spam operation has infiltrated abandoned subdomains belonging to major institutions including Nvidia, Stanford University, NPR, and the U.S. government's vaccines.gov site, flooding them with AI-generated content that subsequently appears in search results and Google's AI Overview feature.

The scheme, reports 404 Media, posted over 62,000 articles on Nvidia's events.nsv.nvidia.com subdomain before the company took it offline within two hours of being contacted by reporters. The spam articles, which included explicit gaming content and local business recommendations, used identical layouts and a fake byline called 'Ashley' across all compromised sites. Each targeted domain operates under different names -- 'AceNet Hub' on Stanford's site, 'Form Generation Hub' on NPR, and 'Seymore Insights' on vaccines.gov -- but all redirect traffic to a marketing spam page. The operation exploits search engines' trust in institutional domains, with Google's AI Overview already serving the fabricated content as factual information to users searching for local businesses.

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