After Vid.me purchase news sites are now showing embedded porn videos

Naughty videos greeted readers of major new sites after porn company 5 Star HD Porn bought the expired domain

HuffPost and other sites showed embedded malware after the recent vidme purchase.

Global new sites like The Washington Post, New York Magazine, or HuffPost shocked many readers with pornographic content on July 22, 2021. Anyone who opened their news stories was met with displayed porn videos instead of the once-embedded intended ones.^[1].

This huge failure is tied to the vid.me domain takeover after the porn company 5 Star HD Porn bought the domain for the video hosting site. Its eems that prominent new websites relied on the service to embed streaming videos in their articles. However, the domain has been defunct for four years as of right now and has had its ownership transferred to different parties.

Readers didn't expect porn on high-stake news sites and were rightfully shocked. Not safe for work explicit videos were playing with no apparent relevance to the stories. It seems that some sites haven't fixed the problem yet and are still stuck with provocative videos.

This fiasco was reported by Motherboard, by a user named DOXIE, who shared examples of problematic content via their Twitter thread. As new sites still grapple with this fail, it is not clear what caused the videos to become embedded in the sites in the first place.

Porn videos ending up on new sites is hardly a supply-chain incident

The events that took place and resulted in porn videos being available on prominent sites are a bit murky. It seems that all of the affected sites had been relying on the video streaming provider, VidMe, that could embed streaming content. While doing so, websites tend to use HTML frames to display the videos hosted on the vid.me domain.

The problem is, VidMe is long gone. It shut down way back, in 2017 and all hosted videos were scheduled for deletion. It means that frames that would be embedded, would have shown nothing or an error message. However, vid.me domain's ownership was updated sometime this month, showing activity.

So there is only one logical explanation of how porn ended up on online new sites. A porn company, called 5 Star Porn HD, bought the domain from VidMe. That led to all VidMe videos being displayed on the homepage of 5 Star HD, rather than the original videos. In this way, not-porn websites suddenly displayed people having sex^[2].

Domain security is important as everyday cybercrime and possibility of threats become bigger and bigger. Precautions could help reduce risks while hosting generated content and secure identity in order to not fall prey to hackers^[3].

Back in the day, VidMe was a popular platform

It is unclear whether this domain takeover will cause more problems. One thing that is known, is the fact that before the shut down in 2017 VidMe was popular, widely used, and even competed with YouTube. The platform started in 2014 and focused on more community-oriented video usage: more transparent, and more equitable to creators.

VidMe was inspired by Reddit's crowd curation, as it was seen as an opportunity to improve the experience for both viewers and curators by allowing the community to surface trending content. At that time, it was something new, revolutionary, and different than what YouTube was doing^[4].

With growing internet consumption, such fails and even threats become new normal. This online environment increases exposure to threats as new consumption protocol requires more of everything^[5]. With that in mind, everyday users and businesses alike need to come up with stronger security procedures and safety protocols.