Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.

Scammers have exploited the poor record-keeping practices of university website administrators, leading to explicit porn and malicious content being served on prestigious university domains like berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu. Researcher Alex Shakhov discovered hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities being abused, with Google listing thousands of hijacked pages. The scammers, possibly linked to a group known as Hazy Hawk, take advantage of outdated CNAME records that are not removed when subdomains are decommissioned, allowing them to hijack the university's subdomain and manipulate search results.