• An Nvidia events page has been hijacked with AI generated spam
• NPR, Stanford, and some US government sites were also taken over
• The spam seems to be explicit but non-malicious

Several Nvidia-owned web domains were hijacked to show explicit and AI-generated content in a spam campaign that also targeted NPR, Stanford, and US Government sites.

The Nvidia page, events.nsv.nvidia[,]com has now been taken down, but was seemingly an events site. The page was taken over and more than 62,000 AI-generated articles were posted, primarily containing incorrect or incomplete information about popular search topics like video game round-ups or restaurant recommendations.

Elsewhere, a domain belonging to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advising on vaccines was also targeted, being defaced in a similar fashion.

WowLazy spam campaign

It’s not clear who hijacked the site or the purpose behind it, since the AI slop doesn’t seem to have a consistent theme or angle. The links in the pages direct to a “nonsense SEO spam page” stocks.wowlazy[.]com.

Much of the content appears to have been apparently explicit, but much was also “entirely mundane” – the spam campaign was discovered thanks to a technologist who was searching for ‘best Portland cat cafes’ on DuckDuckGo and was directed to the events.nsv.nvidia[,]com site and a spam page about cat cafes.

This isn’t the first time that cybercriminals have hijacked websites in order to post their own content, but usually this contains some type of malware of infostealer to gain profit from the spam campaigns – but as far as we can see, that wasn’t the case on this occasion.

SEO seems to be a tool that cybercriminals are taking advantage of in order to deliver malware (or not) to a wider audience. To mitigate the risk from this type of attack, users should disable push notifications from sites they don’t know/trust, and be very cautious with unfamiliar links.

TechRadar Pro did reach out to the CDC, NPR, Stanford, and Nvidia for comment but haven’t yet received a response.

Via 404media

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Ellen has been writing for almost four years, with a focus on post-COVID policy whilst studying for BA Politics and International Relations at the University of Cardiff, followed by an MA in Political Communication. Before joining TechRadar Pro as a Junior Writer, she worked for Future Publishing’s MVC content team, working with merchants and retailers to upload content.