Cal Poly’s website gave visitors a surprise: hardcore porn
An official Cal Poly website for the San Luis Obispo university’s Orfalea College of Business has all the related links you would expect: course descriptions, career pages, student groups and ... porn?
For several months, it appears that people who clicked to learn more about a professional student group called Information Systems Association were instead directed to a page filled with images of hardcore pornography.
Those included pictures of penetration, photos of male and female genitalia and images of women who appeared to be underage — an unfortunate look for a school working to create a more inclusive environment.
A Reddit user first posted about the link on Tuesday. Within hours, the link was redirected to the actual student club, which describes itself as “a professional club for anyone with an interest in the information systems field.”
The Tribune confirmed that Cal Poly did actually link to porn by looking at old versions of the Cal Poly site on the Wayback Machine, which archives websites.
So, how did this happen?
It appears that the student group didn’t pay the domain fee for its old URL address, and a porn site scooped it up. The URL, cpsloisa.com, now features pornography. Internet receipts show a new owner registered the web address in October 2019.
The current web address for the Information Systems Association is isacalpoly.com, which was registered in August 2019.
Cal Poly says the student organization’s site was hacked.
“Yesterday evening, the university’s Information Technology Services team discovered that an outdated link leading from the Orfalea College of Business website to a student organization’s site had been hacked to redirect to a pornography site,” university spokesman Matt Lazier told The Tribune on Wednesday morning.
“The site in question was not a university-maintained site; however, it was linked to a university page,” he said. “Immediately upon learning of this, our team corrected the issue by updating the link to the student organization’s new website.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2020 at 11:44 AM.
