CDSA

CPS 2020: Akamai Equates Anti-Piracy Game to Chess

At the Dec. 8 virtual Content Protection Summit, Mark Barron, principal solutions engineer for Akamai, shared his company’s approach to piracy today.

“What we think of as fighting piracy at Akamai is very similar to a game of chess,” he said during his presentation “Protecting, Detecting, and Enforcing Security Policies From Content Creation to Viewer Experience.” “You have to know your opponent before you sit down, you have to know what you’re opponent is going to do five to 10 moves before they do, and the more you play the game, the better you get.”

And Akamai plays the game a lot, whether it be tracking down premium, first run VOD assets on locker sites, helping shut down live event links shared on social networks, or reinforcing geo-restrictions being compromised by proxied viewers.

During his presentation, Barron shared how easy it can be to find an NFL or NBA game online, with people using VPNs to overcome geo restrictions, and how Akamai’s clients are increasingly demanding that broadcasters and other distributors do better to overcome those issues.

One of the biggest issues, Barron said, was the sheer volume of access points pirates have to steal content, from acquisition and production, through distribution and consumption. “If you send your content off to sound recording studios, or color correction studios, that content sits in uncontrolled networks,” he said. “We’re editing in the cloud a lot more. These are all vulnerabilities.”

Akamai’s approach to tackling content piracy involves a 360-degree security posture, covering protection, detection, enforcement, intelligence and cooperation, meant to address the full breadth of vulnerabilities, including token sharing, API DDoS attacks, geography spoofing, modified APKs, credential stuffing, social attacks and rebroadcasting.

“We don’t look at just protecting the video asset itself,” Barron said. “We look at protecting access to the asset before you actually deliver it.”

To view the full presentation, click here. To view the presentation slide deck, click here.

Presented by Microsoft Azure, the Content Protection Summit was sponsored by SHIFT, Genpact, Akamai, Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, GeoGuard, PacketFabric, Palo Alto Networks, Richey May Technology Solutions, Splunk, Zixi, EIDR, Cyberhaven and Xcapism Learning.