NYC.com is found hosting a Pirate Torrent Site

• NYC.com, the go-to source for everything that people love about New York City, is found to be hosting a pirate site.
• Reportedly, the official website has a copy of 1337x hidden on its subdomain.
• The New York based company is a huge brand that sells tickets and hotel inventory and this reported breach could be damaging to the brand.

Piracy is a monster, and the Internet is your bed, under which the monster hides. Often the monster gets creative and manages to hide brilliantly, but it cannot hide from everyone - not all the time. Today, Torrent Freak reported that it stumbled upon a copy of the popular site 1337x on NYC.com under the domain “cdn.nyc.com.” Now, this is a news, as NYC.com is a massive brand which was established in 1996 and has a business model that sells hotel inventories and tickets, chiefly for deals in New York.

It is still a mystery that why an established business would bother to expand its domain to a torrent site. Torrent Freak believes that the presence of a torrent site in one of NYC.com’s domain is not an intentional move, rather it could be a part of a breach. Logically stating, it could be an old content delivery network (CDN) domain entry which could have been breached by the torrent site.

The result of the breach is visibly damaging to the brand, which has built the trust amongst its users over the past couple of decades. NYC.com is seemingly hosting thousands of pages that have copyrighted content, sharing which is apparently illegal. Hosting such a torrent site is not something a legitimate website would do.

Torrent Freak has reported that the entire “cdn.nyc.com” domain is being used by the torrent site. NYC.com still reportedly use CDN which is now served from satanic.nyc.com. The mentioned breach has clearly cheated the staff that manages the site, as there were no reports on the breach, neither it has been fixed. However, the breach couldn’t escape the eyes of the various copyright holders. As per the report, popular content creators and publishers including Sony Pictures and Netflix has sent a takedown request to Google against the domain.

The report also mentions that the first takedown request was raised early in June, which was subsequentially followed by reporting more than 1000 URLs. It is unknown if any of the mentioned publishers have tried to directly contact NYC.com.

Torrent Freak did report the issue to the site’s owner, to which the NYC.com’s spokesperson replied, ‘the issue has been reported to the development team.’

Expectedly, NYC.com will soon take down the torrent pages, or at least announce the reason behind hosting them.

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