PornHub.com has denied a researcher’s claims malicious advertising with embedded files – or “malvertising” – is rife on the popular pornographic site.
HumanIPO reported yesterday on research by Conrad Longmore which claimed PornHub.com and xHamster.com, both popular pornographic sites, hosted malicious advertising.
Longmore claimed PornHub had malvertising on 12.7 per cent of its pages.
But officials from Manwin, which operates the site, said statements in a BBC article reporting the research “grossly exaggerate the potential security implications of visiting” the site, and claimed the research could be contradicted.
“The article refers to figures compiled on a blog that were based on Google’s diagnostic advice service,” the officials said. “In the three-month period during which that data was compiled, we can confirm that we served over 33 billion ads and believe that only 0.003 percent of those may have potentially had malware.
“According to Google’s safe-browsing diagnostics, PornHub is currently not listed as a suspicious site. The alleged numbers suggested by the BBC article is inconsistent with the facts currently presented by both Google and the security researcher referenced in the article.
The officials noted PornHub implements rigorous web security programmes, and scans all adverts for malware before they go live on the site.
“This is a multipronged approach of both internal cutting-edge scanning applications, as well as industry standard tools used by the world’s top-trafficked sites for comprehensive protection, scanning over 100,000 ads each day,” they said.
Longmore had asked users to “kick up a fuss” about the “malvertising”, as otherwise it would continue to go unreported.
“Part of the problem is that porn is a taboo subject,” he said. “But the reality is that these are hugely popular sites with many of them in the top 100 most popular sites globally.”
