With that, they have now hijacked that university’s subdomain. Given the reputations universities have, search queries then flow to the top of Google’s results. Shakhov wrote : The root cause is simple: organizations create DNS records and never clean them up. There is no expiry date on a CNAME record. Nobody gets an alert when the target stops responding. And most university IT departments don’t maintain a comprehensive inventory of their subdomains and where they point. This is compounded by how universities operate—they are highly decentralized. Individual departments, labs, research groups, and student organizations can often request subdomains independently. When people leave, there is no decommissioning process for the DNS records they created. Finding hijacked subdomains is straightforward. People need only enter site:[university].edu “xxx” or site:[university].edu “porn” for an affected institution, and scores of results will appear.…