European Space Agency Website Exploited to Advertise Shady IPTV Services

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The European Space Agency's Cosmos portal is dedicated to space exploration. While the organization scans stars and galaxies far away, its own infrastructure is quietly hosting hundreds of PDFs promoting shady IPTV services, ranking them in Google right beside official Gaia mission updates. The SEO 'hack' is reminiscent of an exploit that previously hit the European Commission's Eurostat website.

The Cosmos portal is one of the most active corners of the European Space Agency’s website.

Run by ESA’s Science Program, it hosts mission-support pages and public data archives for Gaia, Euclid, XMM-Newton, and dozens of other missions, backed by a science archive that now runs to more than a petabyte of data.

European Space IPTV Recommendations

This valuable archive provides key information for researchers and, more recently, it also started to appeal to people who are looking for a cheap pirate IPTV subscription. This clearly isn’t official ESA material, but an exploit by scammers who uploaded hundreds of scammy PDF files to the site’s repository.

A simple site:cosmos.esa.int search shows the scope of the problem. In addition to genuine results, such as a notice that the Gaia satellite was switched off in March 2025, Google returns a series of documents with titles including “Top 10 IPTV Providers Right Now: The Definitive 2026 Rankings” and “Best IPTV Service Provider in the USA 2026…”

Scammy PDFs on ESA’s website

Because ESA’s .int domain has a good reputation and high authority, these scammy PDF files also rank well in regular search results. Those who search for the best premium IPTV subscriptions for Android will get the ESA domain as the first result through a featured Google snippet.

Best premium IPTV subscriptions for android

Google’s AI Overview is also picking up ESA’s recommendations for the top IPTV services, with information that comes straight from the scammers’ PDFs.

IPTV, Instagram Followers, and Free Robux

There are hundreds of these results, with many new ones being added while we write this article. The PDFs we checked don’t appear to be malicious. They function as advertisements for pirate IPTV services. Whether these indeed offer what they promise is unknown, but visiting these hyperlinked URLs is not advised.

One of the PDFs

The IPTV ads are only part of the problem. The same corner of ESA’s portal also hosts unrelated scam content, including a “Free Coin Master Spins Guide” aimed at mobile-game players, “Free Instagram Followers,” and “Free Robux codes.” These free offerings undoubtedly come at a cost and should be avoided too.

The broad mix of scammy offers shows that ESA’s website is being exploited more broadly. How these people gained access to the server is unknown. According to ESA’s documentation, uploading requires site-editor access to the Cosmos portal, but there might be a weakness in the system.

Known SEO Exploit

The goal of these PDFs is to rank high in Google search results for popular terms. This is a known SEO hack that we have seen numerous times before.

Last year, for example, the European Commission’s Eurostat portal was exploited in the same way, with scam PDFs climbing to the top spot for terms like “best IPTV providers of 2025.”

To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to ESA yesterday, asking whether it was aware of the documents, how they were uploaded, and how long they had been online. We will update this article if we hear back.

At the time of writing, the IPTV documents remain live on the Cosmos portal. If history is any guide, cleaning them up won’t be the end of it. They will either come back, or they will resurface on another website, repeating the same trick.