CDSA

GeoGuard: Guarding Against Geolocation Fraud and Geo-Piracy Amid New Challenges

GeoGuard helps media and entertainment companies detect and monitor geolocation fraud and geo-piracy using proven and easy-to-integrate solutions that worked before the pandemic opened the door to new fraud and piracy issues …  and the company’s solutions are now fighting those new fraud and piracy challenges created by COVID-19 also, according to Robin Alexander, Senior Regulatory Affairs Specialist at GeoGuard.

The company’s founders created GeoGuard’s parent company, GeoComply Solutions, with one key objective, she told MESA. “To fill a missing piece of the technology landscape: a geolocation system that could defeat any location spoofing tools, operate to an extremely high level of accuracy and could stand up to intense scrutiny.”

Eight years after the company’s launch, it is now servicing hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

While GeoComply mainly services the highly-regulated Internet gaming industry, GeoGuard serves other sectors requiring high quality location security services, Alexander noted, adding: “These industries include fintech, online media, and entertainment. Within the OTT ecosystem, we guard against geo-piracy and work to ensure rightsholders are receiving the full value for their content.”

GeoGuard’s Solutions

GeoGuard fields a suite of geo-filtering and fraud-proof solutions, combined with human intelligence, that are designed to stop Internet users from spoofing their locations, Alexander pointed out.

GeoGuard DB is the company’s “most simple to integrate, ‘Hollywood Studio Approved’ solution” and detects Internet Protocol (IP) masking tools including Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Domain Name Systems (DNS) proxies to protect against geolocation fraud and geo-piracy, she said.

That solution is popular among the company’s over-the-top (OTT) customers, including British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The CW, Prime Video and Roku, thanks to its flexibility of integration, including being made available through top Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers in the industry, including Akamai, AWS Cloudfront and others, she said.

TrueLocation API, meanwhile, “provides advanced location fraud detection by utilizing real-time and historic risk engines to identify and flag potentially fraudulent activity,” she pointed out. “It’s capable of analyzing multiple sources of location data, from IP address to GPS and Wi-Fi triangulation. As a result, TrueLocation API guards against a wide variety of fraud, including account sharing and account takeover,” she said.

“While piracy is a complex issue, geo-piracy and location-based fraud are problems that can be easily solved with GeoGuard’s solutions,” she added.

The solutions are based on patented and award-winning anti-fraud technologies that GeoComply developed for the complex and highly-regulated U.S. online gaming industry.

As a result of those origins, GeoGuard’s anti-fraud technology is unique in that it handles all forms of location data. “It’s capable of performing over 350 fraud checks per geolocation transaction to decide which side of a geofence a user is, to within 40 yards of accuracy,” according to Alexander. She called it a “step change from IP based geolocation which is only reliable to a country level and easily spoofed.”

GeoGuard’s solutions “meet the highest standards of technical integrity, with routine testing and validation by third parties, regulatory scrutiny and continuous improvement to tackle current and emerging geolocation fraud threats,” she noted.

Within the media space, GeoGuard’s proprietary IP collection techniques — enabled by software running on over 300 million devices – “prevent geo-piracy and protect the rights of content owners, by verifying that users are not spoofing their IP address in order to access content illegally from OTT platforms” including BBC iPlayer, ITV and Prime Video, she said, adding: “This helps OTT platforms deliver the highest level of content protection compliance while not impacting the user experience of their genuine customers.”

COVID-19 Challenges

“As we have been asked to stay at home during this pandemic, the OTT streaming industry has played an important role in keeping us entertained,” Alexander pointed out.

“Unfortunately, this has also led to a surge in the use of VPNs and DNS Proxy services to bypass territorial restrictions on premium content,” she said, explaining: “As a result, it’s more important than ever for content owners to utilize solutions to stop geo-piracy and geolocation fraud. This is particularly important given that rightsholders are increasingly reliant on revenue from online content streaming since attendance at amusement parks, movie theatres and live events remain low.”

One example of a specific geo-piracy technique that GeoGuard protects its customers from is the one that uses “hijacked residential IP addresses from tens of millions of compromised devices to by-pass traditional VPN detection,” she noted.

“Millions of users have unwittingly had their residential IP address hijacked by ‘free’ VPN providers who sell residential IPs to the highest bidder — usually other VPNs and DNS Proxies that charge their users premium prices for access to these ‘undetectable’ residential IP addresses,” she said, adding: “Fortunately, GeoGuard has a solution.”

Because residential IP addresses are expensive to use for actual content delivery, they are only utilized at the website level to grant users access to the content, she pointed out. “When a broadcaster is utilizing a CDN that’s integrated with GeoGuard, once the actual video starts streaming at the CDN level, the VPN switches to a cheaper, non-residential, datacenter IP address,” she noted, explaining: “This switch can be detected by the CDN that’s running GeoGuard, and the streaming session can be immediately stopped.”

So, “in summary, by integrating GeoGuard DB at the CDN level, residential IP addresses can be easily detected, and the illegal stream stopped,” she added.

Standout Use Cases

Before implementing GeoGuard, one sports OTT broadcaster was at risk of losing its live soccer rights because it had no defenses against IP spoofing tools, Alexander told MESA.

However, GeoGuard was able to get that customer live in a week and, in the days that followed, “we identified up to 70% of attempted connections to the broadcaster’s service were coming from VPNs,” she noted.

GeoGuard was also “honored to have a leading multimedia and entertainment company, PCCW, write a letter of recommendation for GeoGuard services earlier this year,” she said, explaining: “They required a flexible and reliable API solution for VPN and Proxy detection to satisfy content protection requirements. They also wanted a high quality and up-to-date data source that minimized the impact of false positives on their legitimate user base of over one million subscribers. According to their reference, GeoGuard responded quickly to deploy GeoGuard DB ‘swiftly and painlessly’ while providing high-quality service with our 24/7 customer support team.”

Fighting for Gender Equality

GeoComply Solutions, meanwhile, is “very proud that currently 41% of our employees and 42% of those in leadership positions are women,” according to Alexander.

She explained: “We know that accelerating gender equality requires continual effort, both inside and outside of our organization. So, one of our corporate goals this year was to ensure any GeoComply hosted event is attended by at least 30% women, growing each subsequent year in order to achieve parity.”

Although COVID-19 “put a pause on events in 2020, we look forward to putting this goal into action when we are once again able to host events,” she said.

What’s Next for GeoGuard?

“There is a rising number of readily available tools that are used to hide a user’s true identity on the Internet,” Alexander said.

“Simultaneously, Internet anonymity continues to be exploited to undermine digital trust and security,” she noted. Therefore, GeoGuard “continues to enhance and develop our solutions to keep ahead of this trend and provide transparency and location security to our customers,” she said.

Looking ahead, she said GeoGuard “looks forward to working collaboratively with rightsholders, OTT platforms and technology providers, in forums such as the CDSA, to further our industry’s shared content protection message and goals.”

Meanwhile, it “doesn’t come as a surprise that bad actors are seeking to exploit the shift to the online environment that we are experiencing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she went on  to say.

“The uptick in Internet-based fraud is hugely concerning, the long-term impacts of which will continue to challenge many industries throughout 2021,” she predicted.

“We know that cybercriminals and online fraudsters thrive in anonymity, which is primarily what GeoGuard seeks to address,” she told MESA.

“As the tools that bad actors utilize to spoof their location continue to become more sophisticated, it is imperative that organizations are equipped with the correct tools to identify a user’s true location, contributing to greater digital identity security,” she said.

Therefore, “GeoGuard continues to stand ready to instill transparency and trust in the online environment via location-based security,” she concluded.