davidlevene.co.uk

8-level deep HTML entity escaping loop

$ dig TXT davidlevene.co.uk

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;davidlevene.co.uk. IN TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:

davidlevene.co.uk. 3600 IN TXT "&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;meta name=google-site-verification content=fPKE6GXeDgiIg9HfxpNSXo_2aepY8tsxHmWJuEqqgmY /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;"

What Happened

This poor administrator fell victim to a broken CMS. They pasted a `<meta>` tag for Google verification into their domain dashboard. The backend sanitized the HTML entities. They likely hit "save," saw the code look weird, and saved it again — creating a cascading chain of double-encodings. The final result is `&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;meta name=google-site-verification...`, where the opening `<` is encoded 8 times over.

Full TXT Record Value

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;meta name=google-site-verification content=fPKE6GXeDgiIg9HfxpNSXo_2aepY8tsxHmWJuEqqgmY /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;