Feedburner RSS URLs Being Hijacked (Chicago Public Media/WBEZ)

[Steve LaPorte]

Hello,

I am reaching out with a weird issue our organization has started to see over the past month. I am writing on behalf of Chicago Public Media (WBEZ / Vocalo / Chicago Sun-Times). My name is Steve LaPorte and I am one of the IT Administrators at CPM.

We are experiencing issues with some of our Feedburner RSS URLs. Specifically, these URLs are being hijacked and reused by unauthorized sources, pointing people to podcasts and other content that is not associated with Chicago Public Media / WBEZ.

I attempted to submit a ticket with Google Workspace support, but Feedburner is not included in the list of products for which support is available - so I found this group and am trying here.

For context - our Feedburner account was managed by someone who is no longer with the organization. This was likely a "personal" Feedburner/Google account which was eventually migrated into a managed Google Workspace account under our original chicagopublicmedia.org Google Workspace tenant. Earlier this year, we migrated all data from that tenant into a different Workspace tenant. As a result, I believe we have lost access to the account that "owns" all these old Feedburner URLs/feeds. 

Is there any way Feedburner Support can assist us with reclaiming ownership of these feeds to ensure that this stops happening?

Two examples of hijacked feeds:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/StrangeBrewsPodcast - This was the feed for WBEZ's "Strange Brews" podcast. It has been hijacked by a podcast about strip clubs.

https://feeds.feedburner.com/StrangeBrewsPodcast - This is the feed for WBEZ's Curious City Podcast. It has been hijacked by a Vietnamese merchant posting Pinterest links. 

Some other (ACTIVE, IN USE) feeds that belong to us are:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/PleasureTown
https://feeds.feedburner.com/HitItOrQuitIt
https://feeds.feedburner.com/Duelingcritics
https://feeds.feedburner.com/BestGameInTown
https://feeds.feedburner.com/generaladmissionpodcast

And some inactive/no longer used feeds that we own are: 

https://feeds.feedburner.com/writteninside
https://feeds.feedburner.com/EveryOtherHour
https://feeds.feedburner.com/TheMorningShift

These feeds would have belonged to an account (or accounts?) tied to one or any of the following email addresses (I've broken up the addresses so they don't get scraped for spam):

wbez.feedburner  (AT)  gmail.com

podcasts  (AT)   wbez.org

podcasts  (AT)   chicagopublicradio.org

podcasts  (AT)   chicagopublicmedia.org

web  (AT)   wbez.org

web  (AT)   chicagopublicmedia.org

web  (AT)   chicagopublicradio.org

webmaster  (AT)   wbez.org

webmaster  (AT)   chicagopublicmedia.org

webmaster  (AT)   chicagopublicradio.org

Ideally, we would like all of these feeds to be moved back to one "owner" account tied to podcasts (AT) wbez.org. 

Please let me know if there is any way you can assist with this, or if there is any additional information needed from my / CPM's end to prove ownership and make this happen. 

Thank you,

Steve LaPorte

Network Administrator, Chicago Public Media

[Steve LaPorte]

My apologies - I pasted the same hijacked feed URL twice. Here is the correct URL for the "Curious City Podcast":

https://feeds.feedburner.com/CuriousCityPodcast - This is the feed for WBEZ's Curious City Podcast. It has been hijacked by a Vietnamese merchant posting Pinterest links. 

[Brian Walker]

Hi Steve, 

can you email this request to feedburn...@google.com from an official email address for Chicago Public Media?

[Steve LaPorte]

Thank you Brian - I've just sent this as an email to that address.