{"id":208256,"date":"2026-04-24T19:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T19:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/why-are-top-university-websites-serving-porn-it-comes-down-to-shoddy-housekeeping\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T19:00:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T19:00:39","slug":"why-are-top-university-websites-serving-porn-it-comes-down-to-shoddy-housekeeping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/why-are-top-university-websites-serving-porn-it-comes-down-to-shoddy-housekeeping\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Websites for some of the world\u2019s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently.<\/p>\n

The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps:\/\/causal.stat.berkeley.edu\/ymy\/video\/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps:\/\/conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu\/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps:\/\/provost.washu.edu\/app\/uploads\/formidable\/6\/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor\u2019s computer is infected and advising the visitor to pay a fee for the non-existent malware to be removed. In all, researcher Alex Shakhov said, hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities are being abused. Search results returned by Google list thousands of hijacked pages.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n A handful of hijacked columbia.edu subdomains listed by Google<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n One of the sites redirected by a UC Berkeley subdomain.<\/p>\n

Hijacking a university’s good name<\/h2>\n

Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers\u2014which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk<\/a>\u2014are seizing on what amounts to a clerical error by site administrators of the affected universities. When they commission a subdomain such as provost.washu.edu, they create a CNAME<\/a> record, which assignes a subdomain to a “cononical” domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned\u2014something that happens frequently for various reasons\u2014the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record.<\/p>\n

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Websites for some of the world\u2019s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently. The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps:\/\/causal.stat.berkeley.edu\/ymy\/video\/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps:\/\/conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu\/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps:\/\/provost.washu.edu\/app\/uploads\/formidable\/6\/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208257,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping. - UshopWell.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/why-are-top-university-websites-serving-porn-it-comes-down-to-shoddy-housekeeping\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why are top university websites serving porn? 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