discovered<\/a> by the Wichita outlet 12 News, promoted \u201cAI-generated adult images & videos\u201d that are \u201cultra-realistic, fully customizable.\u201d The local news outlet reported that Kobach\u2019s office removed the document containing the ad soon after being notified of its presence. Kobach\u2019s office did not respond to a request for additional information.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWill Colston, a spokesperson for Granicus, the government technology firm credited at the bottom of the website with its design, said the company’s platform had not been hacked. Colston also wrote in an email that “the illicit content was not at all visible on the website itself,” though it was hosted on the state’s server and accessible in search engine results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere has been no breach of Granicus systems or products, nor exposure of any data,\u201d reads a Granicus statement provided to 12 News. \u201cIn the few cases affecting Granicus customers, an individual (or individuals) attached illicit content to a public form they submitted through a government web portal intended for communicating resident feedback or service requests. The attachment was then indexed by Google and other web crawlers, causing it to appear in search results.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The company also said it \u201chas implemented a block on our security platform\u201d to prevent such scenarios from recurring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Corrected Nov. 25, 2025: This story was updated after a spokesperson from Granicus provided additional clarifying details about the event. The advertisement was not visible to ordinary users of the attorney general’s website, but could be found through search engine results.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The state website platform operated by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach recently hosted an advertisement for an illicit service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":73800,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20646],"tags":[2927,16536,23228,26020,26021,26022],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4696],"class_list":["post-73799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-granicus","tag-cybersecurity","tag-attorney-general","tag-kris-kobach","tag-ai-generated-images","tag-website-exploit","author-colin-wood"],"yoast_head":"\n
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