Motherboard reports some of the biggest news outlets started displaying porn videos after a domain name mix-up.
Many major websites used the service vid.me to embed video streaming, but apparently, the domain expired and has been defunct for around four years. Its ownership was transferred over to different parties. Recently, it was taken over by a porn site.
As a result, websites of major newspapers and magazines, such as The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and Huffpost, were displaying NSFW videos to all visitors replacing the real ones.
Unfortunately, some news websites are still stuck with this problem, as they still are showing NSFW videos.
The incident was first reported by Motherboard, after the issue was spotted by user DOXIE and shared on Twitter.
The affected sites that were relying on the video streaming company, Vidme, to embed their content, would use HTML iframes to display the videos. When in 2017, the Vidme site closed down, its homepage was replaced with a farewell message, and all of its hosted videos were deleted on December 15th, 2017.
In practice, this meant that those iframes would have probably shown nothing or an error message under normal circumstances. But, according to the WHOIS details about the domain name, vid.me was updated this month.
It was later revealed that the domain was taken over by a porn company, which then redirected all the vid.me links to its own site. As a result, all the websites that previously used Vidme to embed content have now served hardcore porn.
The domain vid.me was apparently bought by 5 Star HD Porn, who also owns the site 5Starhdporn.com.
If you used Vidme to host your content on your website, it’s a good idea to purge all links to the former service.
