Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.

Hazy Hawk swoops in 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. Dan Goodin – Apr 24, 2026 3:00 pm | 58 Credit: ssuaphoto | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: ssuaphoto | iStock / Getty Images Plus Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Websites for some of the world’s 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 case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor’s 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. A handful of hijacked columbia.edu subdomains listed by Google A handful of hijacked columbia.edu subdomains listed by Google One of the sites redirected by a UC Berkeley subdomain. One of the sites redirected by a UC Berkeley subdomain. Hijacking a university’s good name Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers—which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk—are 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 record, which assignes a subdomain to a “canonical” domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned—something that happens frequently for various reasons—the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record. With that, they have now hijacked that university’s subdomain. Given the reputations universities have, search queries then flow to the top of Google’s results. Shakhov wrote: The root cause is simple: organizations create DNS records and never clean them up. There is no expiry date on a CNAME record. Nobody gets an alert when the target stops responding. And most university IT departments don’t maintain a comprehensive inventory of their subdomains and where they point. This is compounded by how universities operate—they are highly decentralized. Individual departments, labs, research groups, and student organizations can often request subdomains independently. When people leave, there is no decommissioning process for the DNS records they created. Finding hijacked subdomains is straightforward. People need only enter site:[university].edu “xxx” or site:[university].edu “porn” for an affected institution, and scores of results will appear. In some cases, the subdomains returned no longer lead to porn sites, but as of Friday morning, many still did. The lesson here is clear: Any organization with a website should compile a running inventory of all…

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