Copyright Takedown Data May Reveal Compromised Websites
Summary
UpGuard’s Greg Pollock says copyright takedown notices can provide a historical signal of websites manipulated to promote adult content. The notices are not real-time detection, but may help investigate past compromises across vendors.
Key points
- Pollock says an investigation into search-engine spam found Google DMCA notices naming legitimate government and university websites allegedly manipulated to promote unauthorized adult content.
- Content creators’ brand-protection services search for pirated material and submit takedown requests; those notices can expose possible website tampering.
- Pollock says requests from adult-content creators grew from zero to millions in 2024 and 2025, and the number of unique domains identified is also rising.
- The notices provide a historical archive dating back to 2011, but arrive too late to serve as real-time compromise monitoring.
- Government and university websites can be attractive targets because of their search-ranking authority and large, sometimes difficult-to-maintain web footprints.
- Injected search content can be a minor embarrassment or signal more serious access, such as the ability to add malicious JavaScript or expose users and data.
- Pollock recommends maintaining CMS and web security, reviewing legacy sites, and monitoring search results for suspicious content.
Article Details
- Event Type
- Research finding: attackers compromise legitimate websites and manipulate search results to promote unauthorized adult content, with DMCA takedown records providing a historical signal of possible compromise.
- Impact
- Reported effects include reputational damage from injected search results. Greg Pollock says the underlying compromise can vary in severity and could involve malicious JavaScript, data exfiltration, or user compromise; the article does not confirm those harms occurred in the cases discussed.
People
Vendors
Googlewhere there were some other indicators of compromise. And then in the process of doing so, I hit up Google, I see all this porn spam on that side. Cool, all that's normal. But at the bottom of the page, theUpGuardadult content. It sounds like an embarrassing but isolated incident. But according to research from UpGuard, these cases may be part of a much larger and growing problem — one that reveals how attackers exploit
Products
Google Transparency ReportGreg Pollock: Yeah, exactly. So, Google publishes the Google Transparency Report; they're sharing lots of information about how they are, you know, acting on content to enforce laws and so forth. And so they share aboutOnlyFansengine spam led him to an unexpected source of threat intelligence: copyright takedown requests filed by OnlyFans and other adult content creators. These requests, filed by creators and their brand protection services,