#Major news sites accidentally get riddled with hardcore porn

Major news sites like the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Huffington Post got infiltrated with hardcore porn, apparently after a now-defunct video-hosting site was acquired by a smut company.

On Thursday afternoon, Twitter user @dox_gay screen-grabbed and blurred out some of the images that appeared alongside serious news articles, including a 2015 story from NY Mag about John Boehner’s “creepy kissy face.”

Porn was likewise displayed alongside a 2017 HuffPost article about Martin Shkreli being permanently banned from Twitter, as well as a 2015 piece from Uproxx about Donald Trump coping with a heckler at a CNN GOP debate.

According to Vice, which first reported on the @dox_gay tweets Thursday, the images included explicit thumbnails for videos with titles like “Naughty Spy Girls 2” and “Bottoms Up Brianna,” mostly on archival stories dating from 2014 to 2016 that span pop culture, politics and business.

HuffPost and NY Mag have since removed the porn in question. Uproxx redirected the article link to its homepage instead.

Still, many websites have yet to identify and deal with the problem. According to The National File, other porn-inflicted sites include Vanity Fair, Vox, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, The Mirror, Kokatu and Business Insider Australia.

The smut explosion appears to have resulted after a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a now-defunct YouTube competitor founded in 2014 that shuttered in 2017. Media outlets that had embedded videos from Vidme then became subject to porn infestations.