This article was published on December 15, 2010

Yahoo search hacked? Image result thumbnails are leading to porn pictures. [Updated]


Yahoo search hacked? Image result thumbnails are leading to porn pictures. [Updated]

Updated at the foot of the post.

We’ve reached out to Yahoo for comment, but for now you might want to avoid letting your kids do Yahoo searches. Taking a quick look at any search done from Yahoo.com which might return image results (“iPhone 4 pictures”, for instance) will give you a line of thumbnails that lead somewhere they’re not supposed to lead:

The first image displayed, no matter what thumbnail you click, is a rather graphic, adult-oriented one. For obvious reasons, we won’t display the image here, but be forewarned that it’s there and quite large. The image in question leads to a site called Dunia Upload, where users can upload and link to image of their choosing.

It’s mildly amusing, at best. However, chances are that even Yahoo’s foul-mouthed CEO Carol Bartz didn’t approve this change.

Update: Interestingly, the image has now changed to a safe-for-work explanation of how to decipher a URL. However, no matter what you search for, no matter which thumbnail you click, this same image appears:

As of 2 AM GMT, it appears that Yahoo thumbnail results were linking properly. However, the thumbnail results have now been pulled from the page entirely.

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