PornHub Officials Say Web Researcher Got It Wrong

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- Information disseminated from a BBC article “grossly exaggerate the potential security implications of visiting” PornHub.com, company officials said in a release.

Yesterday’s BBC piece, which XBIZ reported on, said that “malvertising,” or malicious advertising with embedded files, is an ongoing problem for two of the top porn tube sites, PornHub.com and xHamster.com.   

The BBC report said that, according to researcher Conrad Longmore, xHamster had malvertising on 1,067 out of 20,986 pages, or 5 percent, screened in the past 90 days. PornHub was found to have malvertising on 12.7 percent of its pages, Longmore noted.
 
Manwin officials said that Longmore’s data and analysis can be contradicted when it comes to PornHub. (Manwin does not operate xHamster as previously reported.)

“The article refers to figures compiled on a blog that were based on Google's diagnostic advice service,” Manwin 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.

With PornHub.com, which serves 15.5 billion ads each month, “isolated incidents of malware are immediately caught and minute when considering the mammoth amount of traffic our site receives,” said a spokeswoman for Manwin, the company’s parent.
 
Company officials noted that PornHub works hard to implement rigorous web security programs. They said it scans all ads for malware prior to going live and repetitively scans them for as long as they appear on the website.

“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,” company officials said.