Ahrefs reporting thousands of spammy backlinks in the past month from subdomains of high DR sites

I've noticed that myself and many of our competitors (and various niches) are getting hammered with spammy backlinks from really high DR, legit sites (including edu and gov) the past month.

URLs are all structured like this: https://<random subdomain>.<site>.edu/d7s87x/<page>.html

The first subdirectory is a randomly generated, 6 character folder name.

All these sites are legit, which makes me think that there must be a major plugin or Wordpress exploit that is allowing these things to be randomly generated on so many real websites.

Anyone know of a recently announced exploit that would be causing this?

There are too many to disavow and the sites are real, legitimate websites of companies, universities, etc. so I don't think disavowal is a good idea.

Anybody here seeing the same thing in Referring Domains in Ahrefs lately?

Edit: It can't be a Wordpress exploit, since many of these sites aren't using Wordpress. What else could allow hackers to create random subdomains on so many sites?

submitted by /u/ozzemg
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