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Infoblox diagram titled How Domain Shadowing Becomes Gambling SEO, showing five steps: an actor gains access to a DNS account through stolen credentials, insider access or a registrar or DNS provider compromise; creates shadow hostnames under school and government domains; publishes gambling landing pages on external infrastructure; search engines index the content; and gambling operators gain traffic and revenue, while the primary website remains unaffected.
Diagram: Infoblox Threat Intel, "Borrowed Reputation: Domain Shadowing and Gambling SEO," Figure 1, Oct. 26, 2026 (fair use). The generalized workflow seen in both operations.

Threat Intel

Infoblox Says a Search-Ranking Seller It Calls Hidden Hawk Hid More Than 850 Gambling Entry Points Beneath School and Government Domains by Quietly Adding DNS Records

Someone with access to the DNS of schools in Bangladesh and Mexico and a Kerala government office pointed new subdomains at gambling pages on Cloudflare Pages, leaving the real sites untouched. A second, unrelated operation delegated whole subzones of an Indian state government domain to outside nameservers. Infoblox says the fix starts with watching zone changes, not websites.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore5 min read

SINGAPORE - The school websites still worked. So did the government portals. What their owners may not have seen was a growing list of hostnames beneath their domains, each pointing somewhere else and each serving pages for illegal online casinos to whoever arrived from a search engine.

Infoblox Threat Intel said on Monday that it had found two unrelated operations using domain shadowing, in which someone with unauthorized access to an organization's DNS creates new records under its domain while leaving the main site alone, to borrow the search reputation of school and government namespaces for illegal gambling. Because the new hostnames lived only in DNS and led to externally hosted pages, an organization that watched its website or application logs could miss them, the company wrote.

Infoblox does not know how either actor got in. It lists stolen credentials, an insider, a compromised registrar or DNS provider, or another breach of the domain-management environment as possibilities.

Hidden Hawk: one CNAME at a time

The first actor, which Infoblox tracks as Hidden Hawk, appears to sell search visibility to illegal Indonesian gambling brands. Infoblox counted more than 30 brands and more than 850 observed entry points across eight institutional domains in Bangladesh, India and Mexico, and calls those figures minimums because research is continuing.

Hidden Hawk added individual CNAME records beneath the institutions' domains, most of them pointing to Cloudflare Pages. The pages.dev hostname usually copied the victim hostname with the dots replaced by hyphens, which let Infoblox rebuild the links between victim names and hosted pages. One example, link[.]omacuan[.]amc[.]edu[.]et[.]raahs[.]edu[.]bd under a Bangladeshi secondary school's domain, pointed to link-omacuan-amc-edu-et-raahs-edu-bd[.]pages[.]dev and served the same gambling content between July 6 and October 1, 2026.

Screenshot of an Infoblox Dossier lookup for the hostname link.omacuan.amc.edu.et.raahs.edu.bd, from the Infoblox report.
Screenshot: Infoblox Threat Intel, "Borrowed Reputation," Figure 2, Oct. 26, 2026 (fair use).A Dossier lookup of one shadow hostname under a Bangladeshi school's domain; the CNAME pointed to a matching pages.dev name.

Six Bangladeshi school domains carried roughly 50 to more than 240 entries each, some still active, and a school domain in Mexico, escuelanormallarrainzar.edu.mx, carried more than 50 and was still active. A Kerala government subdomain, suneethi.sjd.kerala.gov.in, hosted content directly and received some of the school CNAMEs; Infoblox observed it as remediated in July 2026. The landing pages shared actor-run link shorteners and image hosts, which suggested a service sold to several brands rather than one operator's sites.

Infoblox researchers posing as a casino contacted a Telegram account they believe Hidden Hawk runs. The operator described backlink optimization and custom landing pages, including Google AMP pages, quoted prices in U.S. dollars and Indonesian rupiah with Indonesian bank details and guaranteed a top Google ranking, a claim Infoblox says makes sense when .gov and .edu domains are involved. No payment was made.

Screenshot of Infoblox's Table 1 comparing the two cases: Hidden Hawk added individual CNAME records beneath institutional domains, each mapping one hostname to externally hosted content, mostly on Cloudflare Pages, while the actor targeting Maharashtra and ESIC delegated subzones, including a wildcard under gam.maharashtra.gov.in, to its own DNS environment and served content from DigitalOcean, then CloudFront and BunnyCDN.
Screenshot: Infoblox Threat Intel, "Borrowed Reputation," Table 1, Oct. 26, 2026 (fair use).The two implementations side by side.

Maharashtra: handing over whole subzones

The second operation, which Infoblox has not attributed to Hidden Hawk, worked differently. Instead of adding single records, it delegated subzones of maharashtra.gov.in, including gam, games, search, live and dpboss, to nameservers at ClouDNS, a Bulgarian provider with a free tier, and did the same for online.esic.gov.in. Once the parent zone referred queries outward, the actor could create any name beneath those subzones without touching the government's DNS again, and a wildcard under gam.maharashtra.gov.in let arbitrary names resolve.

Gambling records appeared under the Maharashtra domain from at least August 2025, serving machine-generated pages about rummy, betting, lottery and satta matka from DigitalOcean, then Amazon CloudFront and BunnyCDN. Infoblox no longer saw the delegations in mid-October 2026 and says the compromise appeared to have been remediated.

The money explains the effort. Infoblox puts the unregulated gambling market at nearly $6 trillion worldwide in 2025 and has previously counted more than 1.7 million Chinese-language gambling domains; operators shut out of conventional advertising turn to search engine optimization instead.

Screenshot of Infoblox's Table 3, What DNS Operators Should Monitor, pairing observables such as a new or changed NS delegation, an unexpected subdomain or burst of new names, a CNAME to an unexpected hosting service, a wildcard record, a certificate for an unfamiliar hostname and an unrecognized DNS change with recommended responses.
Screenshot: Infoblox Threat Intel, "Borrowed Reputation," Table 3, Oct. 26, 2026 (fair use).The zone changes Infoblox says to watch.

What defenders and DNS owners can do

  • Monitor authoritative zones for new or changed NS delegations, bursts of new subdomains, new wildcard records and CNAMEs to hosting platforms such as pages.dev, netlify.app, workers.dev and CloudFront, and check each against an owner and a change record.
  • Correlate certificate transparency entries for unfamiliar hostnames under your domains with DNS changes and the approved service inventory.
  • Treat any unrecognized DNS change as a sign that DNS-management credentials are compromised: rotate them, enforce MFA and review registrar and DNS provider access logs.
  • Do not block the victim institutions' second-level domains, Infoblox says; act on the shadow hostnames and the actor infrastructure.
  • Hunt the published infrastructure: Hidden Hawk link shorteners mikale[.]me and hinkale[.]me and image hosts imgmahasuhu[.]io, imghaxor[.]io and imgstore[.]io; and for the Maharashtra operation d9d9t8dndf89z[.]cloudfront[.]net, the inactive A record 168[.]144[.]156[.]92 and the BunnyCDN hosts search-maharashtra-gov-in[.]b-cdn[.]net, games-maharashtra-gov-in[.]b-cdn[.]net and maharashtra-gov-in[.]b-cdn[.]net.

Sources:


Priya Shah covers threat intelligence, intrusion analysis, and adversary tradecraft for SOCtember from Singapore.

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