A bizarre chain reaction of hacking, adult content theft, and copyright enforcement is producing an unexpected outcome: hacked government websites are being taken down by DMCA takedown notices filed by OnlyFans creators.
WIRED reports that scammers have been hijacking legitimate government websites, often poorly maintained municipal or state pages, to host advertisements for “leaked” OnlyFans content. The scammers use the government domains’ authority to avoid spam filters and search engine penalties while promoting fake or stolen adult material.
The accidental cleanup. Adult content creators, whose photos and videos are being used without permission on these pages, are filing DMCA copyright takedown notices with the hijacked domains’ hosting providers and search engines. When the takedown requests are honored, the entire page, including whatever government service or information was originally there, disappears.
The result is a cybersecurity paradox: adult creators are inadvertently scrubbing hacked government infrastructure from the web, one takedown notice at a time. The practice has become widespread enough that security researchers have begun tracking it as an emergent pattern.
Content creator Laura Lux, who has been publishing online for nearly two decades, told WIRED she files takedown notices whenever she discovers her content being used without permission, including on compromised government domains. “I don’t care if it’s a government site or a random blog,” she said. “My content, my copyright.”
The deeper problem. The phenomenon highlights two ongoing security failures: the prevalence of poorly secured government web infrastructure that remains vulnerable to defacement and hijacking, and the unscrupulous ecosystem of scammers who repurpose adult content for fraudulent traffic generation. That the two problems are now canceling each other out in some cases is more accident than strategy, and not a sustainable model for either online safety or government web security.