Aug 06, 2026 12:35:00

The European Space Agency's website has been misused, and PDF files advertising illegal IPTV services are appearing in Google search results.

It has been discovered that the official website of

the European Space Agency (ESA), a space development and research organization jointly established by European countries in 1975, was misused, resulting in hundreds of PDF files advertising suspicious IPTV services appearing in Google search results.

European Space Agency Website Exploited to Advertise Shady IPTV Services * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/european-space-agency-website-exploited-to-advertise-shady-iptv-services/

Cosmos, one of the main portals on the ESA website, is part of the official website run by the ESA's science programs, and publishes data on space telescopes and astronomical observation missions. It provides support pages and public data archives for dozens of space missions, and the total amount of scientific data stored there exceeds 1 petabyte, making it a frequently used resource.

It has been reported that fraudulent PDF files, which are clearly not official ESA documents, have been uploaded as reference materials for Cosmos.

The following are the results of a Google search for 'cosmos.esa.int'. The top result is a document about the ESA's space telescope mission ' Project Gaia ', but the third and fourth results are PDFs related to 'IPTV'.

According to TorrentFreak, which reported on this matter, ESA's .int domain is considered a highly reliable and authoritative site, which is why fraudulent PDF files appear high in regular search results. In fact, there have been cases where the ESA domain appears as the first search result when searching for 'best premium IPTV subscriptions for Android,' even though ESA is not included in the query. Furthermore, there have been cases where 'IPTV services recommended by ESA' appears in Google search's 'AI summary,' but the answer refers to a fraudulent PDF.

There are hundreds of these ESA domain search hacks, and new ones are being added continuously. TorrentFreak says that the PDF files they examined did not contain any malicious data such as malware or phishing links, but they functioned as advertisements for pirated IPTV services, and some even had embedded links to purchase pages.

TorrentFreak contacted the ESA, but has not received a response as of the time of writing. It remains unclear whether the PDF advertising illegal IPTV services exploited a vulnerability in the ESA's content management system or if some upload function was misused.

Google search generally tends to rank domains associated with government agencies, universities, and large corporations higher in search results due to their perceived trustworthiness and authority. Therefore, attackers have historically used the servers of these organizations to host promotional pages and PDFs to improve their search rankings. In fact, in 2025, there were reports of a page advertising IPTV services appearing in search results using the domain of Eurostat , the European Commission's statistics website.