How a domain purchase resulted in media websites displaying adult content

It’s no secret that nearly every website on the Internet will rely on other websites or online services to function correctly.

Whether it’s for website delivery, speed optimisation, content management or serving adverts. Nearly every website out there depends on various core services, and when those core services go wrong, it can have a mega ripple effect across the Internet.

That’s what happened earlier this year when a delivery network called Fastly went down, taking down dozens of high-profile websites along with it, including Reddit, the BBC, CNN and Gov.UK. And only this week another large (though not quite so large) outage caused various gaming and airline sites to go down after another delivery network – Akamai – suffered service issues.

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But in this week’s bizarre story, websites being thrown offline is not the only potential consequence of a third-party service no longer working as intended. In fact, after a number of website admins discovered this week, a third-party service going awry can also lead to their websites inadvertently showing adult videos.

How did that happen?

In the first two cases we mentioned above (Fastly and Akamai) many websites stopped working because those third party services suffered outages. In our story here, the reason is slightly different. In this case, the third party company – a video hosting service called Vid.me which allowed websites to host videos or serve video adverts – actually went out of business – in 2017.

In the same way a website may embed a YouTube video (so the video will play from their webpage without needing to go to YouTube itself) many websites out there were embedding Vid.me videos on their webpages, including the Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Verge and HuffPost.

But Vid.me announced it was shutting down in 2017, and eventually their video services were scrubbed from the Internet, meaning Vid.me embeds stopped working. But who really checks all their years-old articles to see if video embeds are still working? Not the above media companies, it appears.

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And then the domain Vid.me is purchased by a company called 5 STAR HD P**N. It doesn’t take much of a detective to work out what services they offer.

The result was any website that still had defunct Vid.me embed code on their webpages was now no longer showing videos adverts or videos related to their articles. Rather they were showing hardcore adult videos, as per below.

The result was media articles about Supreme Court nominations and bipartisan environmental bills being accompanied with video suggestions titled “Can You Handle the Curves” and “I Want You Bad“.

Needless to say, there are plenty of website managers out there desperately scrubbing any reference to Vid.me from their websites this week.