Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.
Hundreds of subdomains from dozens of universities have been hijacked by scammers.
TL;DR
- Prestigious university websites like berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu are hosting explicit content and scam sites.
- Scammers are hijacking old, decommissioned subdomains by exploiting lingering CNAME records.
- Many universities lack comprehensive inventories of their subdomains and fail to remove records when subdomains are no longer active.
- Finding these hijacked subdomains is easy by searching for terms like 'porn' within a university's domain on Google.
- Organizations are advised to maintain an inventory of subdomains, audit them regularly, and remove CNAME records for inactive subdomains.