Something at the website of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has gone bad.
Though the federal department is typically known for handling policy about agriculture and food safety, it looks like it’s been dipping its toes into a new area: pirated movies.
A large cache of publicly-accessible PDFs recently started appearing on USDA.gov that link to pirated media including movies, TV shows, sporting events, and video games in what appears to be either a hack, an inside job, or some kind of bizarre glitch.
Check out these links, archived from USDA.gov, for illegal streams of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,“ “The Matrix Resurrections,” or the new “Ghostbusters” movie. Or maybe you want to take in a pirated sporting event like a football match between Liverpool and Arsenal, or a UFC fight. Other PDFs offer links to what are clearly scams to buy Instagram followers or Robux for the video game Roblox.
“What is surprising is how widespread it is,” Richard Forno, the assistant director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for Cybersecurity, told Futurism of the apparent breach. “How has this not been noticed?”
The PDFs were specifically appearing on a subdomain of USDA.gov dedicated to SNAP-Ed, a program aimed at educating people on food assistance about shopping and cooking healthy meals. The PDFs, which contain spammy links to pirated media on third-party websites along with garbled text, were sandwiched between wholesome pages on the subdomain about...
Read Full Story: https://futurism.com/usda-pirated-movies
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