AI-generated porn pushed via hijacked State.gov sites

Cybernews reports that California, Indiana, Kansas, Hawaii, Ohio, Nebraska, and at least a dozen other states had at least 38 .gov sites subjected to an SEO poisoning attack that prompted redirections to ads for AI-generated pornography, sex toys and chatbots, and other illicit content since late November.

Despite having been hijacked to serve peculiar PDFs, rap videos, and XXX footage, the state and local government websites, including those belonging to the California Secretary of State, the Nevada Department of Transportation, and the U.S. General Services Administration, have not been exploited, wrote security researcher Dominic Alvieri on X.

Alvieri's statement comes after Denver-based software firm Granicus, which supports thousands of government sites, confirmed that the websites had been infiltrated through malicious content uploaded through public form submissions, with the Google indexing of the nefarious attachments prompting their appearance in search results.

"Granicus takes this abuse very seriously and has implemented a block on our security platform to ensure that uploaded documents are no longer publicly reachable," said the firm in a statement.