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

Some of the world’s leading universities have inadvertently become hosts for explicit content and fraudulent schemes due to poor site administration practices. Recent findings by researcher Alex Shakhov reveal that institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis have subdomains serving pornography and malicious links. Among the troubling examples are URLs like hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html and hXXps://conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia.edu/brazzers-gym-porn, which offer explicit material. Additionally, one site attempts to deceive users into believing their computers are infected, urging them to pay a fee to remove supposed malware. Shakhov noted that hundreds of subdomains across at least 34 universities have been taken over in this manner. A search through Google yields thousands of compromised pages. The exploitation stems from clerical oversights by university administrators. When subdomains are created, a CNAME record links the URL to the hosting IP address. However, when these subdomains are later deactivated, the records often remain intact, allowing scammers, particularly a group known as Hazy Hawk, to register the expired domains and misuse them for their gain.