Adult content creators fighting the piracy of their material are inadvertently helping to clean up hacked government and university websites, according to new research from cybersecurity firm UpGuard shared with WIRED. For years, scammers have hijacked authoritative .gov and .edu domains — which rank highly in Google searches — to host malicious pages using the names of popular OnlyFans models as bait, luring victims towards scams and malware. Because creators and the companies representing them file large volumes of copyright takedown requests, they end up getting these compromised pages removed from Google's search results, effectively neutralising the attacks even though that was never their intention.

UpGuard's analysis found that more than 2,000 government and education domains across 80 countries have received copyright takedowns linked to adult creators over the past 15 years, with a "dramatic" rise in such hijackings since 2020. Since 2011 there have been 384,286 takedown requests covering 631,193 URLs, of which Google appears to have removed around 130,000, with no action taken on roughly 460,000. Affected sites include those in Bangladesh, Colombia, India, Nigeria, the United States and Peru, often featuring pages titled "leaked OnlyFans" videos that redirect to dubious advertising schemes. Google says its anti-spam protections are "highly effective", while experts note that copyright law is ultimately the wrong tool for fixing insecure official websites.