OnlyFans models accidentally cause hacked government sites to disappear

Adult content creator Laura Lux says she’s been posting her photos online for nearly two decades. It is published primarily on OnlyFans These days, but she previously used Patreon and at one point hosted her own subscription site. No matter the platform, people have always tried to steal their content and “leak” it online. “It’s a never-ending battle,” he says. Luxwhich uses the name of its creator for privacy reasons.

“We lose a lot of money just because the content is literally a Google search a lot of the time,” Lux says, describing the often murky side of the Internet. Made up of menwhich shares and trades pirated adult content. However, as the adult creator economy has boomed in recent years, single OnlyFans models and other adult creators have increasingly joined Hollywood, music studios and publishing houses in the fight against pirated content.

Creators have filed millions of requests under copyright laws, with successful requests under DMCA Which results in pages hosting stolen images and videos being removed from search results. “If you’re not running a DMCA service, you probably shouldn’t bother doing this task, because it’ll be everywhere,” Lux says.

However, DMCA requests, often filed by companies representing adult content creators, have also run up against one of the Internet’s long-standing problems: unsafe government and university websites. More than 2,000 government and educational domains, across 80 countries, have received copyright takedown requests associated with adult content creators over the past 15 years, suggesting that sites may have been hacked, according to a new report. New analysis From cybersecurity company UpGuard and shared with WIRED. Several sites have been repeatedly hacked amid a “dramatic” increase in kidnappings related to individual adult creators and their “leaked” OnlyFans content since 2020, UpGuard research says.

For years, scammers have hijacked official websites, which have trusted .gov and .edu domain names that often appear at the top of Google search results, to upload malicious pages and PDFs demanding free downloads of movies, iPhones, pornography, and more. fortnite Skins. These pages then often Link to scams or malware downloads. Increasingly, the scammers behind the schemes are using the names of adult content creators to lure victims to their hacked pages.

“OnlyFans models aren’t meant to help government sites, but in order for them to be able to monitor their copyright ownership, they end up sending a lot of notifications to Google about those sites,” says Greg Pollock, director of research at UpGuard. “In some ways, because of the way the attack works, having Google remove a search result is very effective, because there is no real visibility into the assets outside of Google.”

Some of the recent copyright takedown requests seen by WIRED include government and university websites in Bangladesh, Colombia, India, Nigeria, the United States, and Peru. Infected pages are common. Search results seen by WIRED show .gov and .edu domains with pages titled “largest leak yet” and “leaked from OnlyFans” videos along with the names of adult content creators with millions of followers.

If clicked, the URLs in search results do not display leaked images or videos, and often redirect visitors to scam URLs advertising online dating and other suspicious pages, which could result in the scammers making money Through complex advertising schemes. To upload malicious content, fraudsters may exploit vulnerabilities or vulnerabilities in websites’ publishing systems.

Bullock’s analysis says there have been 384,286 takedown requests, covering 631,193 URLs, from adult content creators to government and educational sites since 2011. The vast majority were submitted in the past few years. Of these requests, Google appears to have removed about 130,000 of these URLs, while taking no action against 460,000, according to Bullock’s analysis.