OnlyFans Models Are Accidentally Making Hacked Government Websites Disappear

Source Domain: www.wired.com

Adult content creator Laura Lux says she has been publishing pictures of herself online for almost two decades. She primarily posts on OnlyFans these days, but she previously used Patreon and at one point hosted her own subscription website. No matter the platform though, people have always tried to steal her content and “leak” it online. “It’s an endless battle,” says Lux, who uses her creator name for privacy reasons.

“We do lose a lot of money just because the content is literally a Google search away a lot of the time,” Lux says, describing the murky online underbelly, mostly made up of men, that shares and trades pirated adult content. However, as the adult creator economy has boomed in recent years, individual OnlyFans models and other adult creators have increasingly joined Hollywood, music studios, and publishing houses in the fight against pirated content.

Content creators have filed millions of requests under copyright laws, with successful requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act resulting in pages hosting stolen pictures and videos being removed from search results. “If you are not running a DMCA service, then you might as well probably not even be bothering doing the job, because it will be everywhere,” Lux says.

However, these DMCA requests, which are often made by companies representing adult content creators, have also collided with one of the internet’s long-standing problems: insecure government and university websites. More than 2,000 domains belonging to governments and education institutions, across 80 countries, have received copyright takedown requests linked to adult content creators over the past 15 years, indicating the sites may have been compromised, according to a new analysis from cybersecurity company UpGuard and shared with WIRED. Many of the sites have been repeatedly compromised amid a “dramatic” increase in hijackings related to individual adult creators and their “leaked” OnlyFans content…

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