CDSA

The industry is starting to turn the tide against video pirates with improved situational awareness and “360 protection” that includes protection, detection and enforcement, according to Akamai.

Media and entertainment organizations face a “range of attack vectors every day” from pirates, Ian Munford, global video industry analyst at the company said Jan. 26 during the webinar “Marshaling Your Forces to Fight Piracy.”

During the session, he and other piracy experts at the company discussed the methods and practices being used by pirates today and some of the most recent technical developments in the fight against video piracy.

Munford started with a comparison of what M&E companies are dealing with compared to what retailers have faced for several years. “Shrinkage has always been a challenge” for retailers, he noted.

“But by using insight gained from years of experience, savvy retailers can reduce their losses to a manageable level or even zero,” he said, adding: “Good operational practices coupled with relevant technology and a very supportive legal system protects to some extent the retail environment.”

M&E organizations “need to adapt to the threat landscape very quickly and very effectively,” he said, explaining: “Video theft has evolved significantly over the last few years. As content protection strategies and technology and legal efforts have improved, so have the attack vectors used by the various pirate groups.”

Pirates will exploit any weakness at an organization, he said, telling viewers: “We’ve seen a lot of attacks recently with groups trying to overwhelm” digital rights management (DRM) and “even hacking editing platforms.”

Attacks sometimes “evolve in minutes and as defenses are put in place to thwart one attack, pirates will regroup and try different methods,” he said, noting: “Their overarching strategy is to find a weak link and exploit it.”

Some methods by pirates, like token harvesting, are very easy to detect and companies can quickly implement relevant protection strategies, he pointed out.

“Through our own piracy monitoring services and actually those of many of our partners we can detect pirate activity in seconds and deploy relevant technology to remove, for example, offending pirate streams,” he said.

There are ways to “stay ahead and counteract vulnerabilities,” according to Eric Elbaz, senior engagement manager at Akamai. “Building on the situational awareness” foundation that Munford laid out, “which is an important part of detection,” Elbaz said detection involves “gaining situational awareness through telemetry and monitoring.”

Meanwhile, “coordinating an effective response to piracy really requires you to understand the types of vulnerabilities and threat surfaces affecting your unique workflow implementation,” Elbaz said. While “situational awareness is certainly paramount in a 360-degree protect posture,” he said, “you really need to look at protecting the content before it leaks and gets compromised” as well.

Underscoring just how significant of an issue piracy continues to be, Shane Keats, global video industry analyst at Akamai, pointed out that the fraud rate for a sports event reached more than 40% during the pandemic.

Piracy hurts jobs also, Keats said, pointing as an example once again to a belief that the NBC TV show “Hannibal” was canceled after its third season because of piracy, despite the network attributing the cancellation to low ratings. Although the show was viewed by many people, it was one of the most heavily pirated shows and many viewers watching it were not paying to do so, he noted.

Piracy also creates licensing challenges, Keats said, pointing to one company losing a  multimillion dollar sports broadcasting deal because of a distribution partner’s mistake. “Your content is only as secure as your least secure partner,” he said, adding: “There are for sure real costs here to our industry.”

Another major issue is the lack of consistency in how organizations handle data in the industry, according to Munford.

The webinar was moderated by Steven Hawley, an industry analyst and managing director of Piracy Monitor.

“If you’re a pay TV operator, you’re familiar with protecting your content using conditional access,” Hawley said at the start of the webinar. “So under the condition that somebody has subscribed and paid for their content, they have access to the programming. And in the streaming world, of course, we’re secured by digital rights management,” he said.

However, “that doesn’t speak for what happens prior to delivery of that media content to the service or video provider,” he said, explaining: “All kinds of things are at risk and are vulnerable to theft – whether it’s a VoD asset, a production copy of a movie a few days before release or maybe it’s something that’s being delivered to a cinema. In the days when we have cinema and people go to the movies, those movies have to get to the movie house somehow and usually they’re delivered over broadband these days.”

Then there is what happens after the event is over, he said, noting live events are streamed to a consumer end user device. “That device can be compromised, the HDMI link can be ripped [and] files can be saved and uploaded to servers for download,” he noted.

“And not only that, entire databases of consumer data can be purchased on clandestine markets and that information can be used in phishing attacks…. After all, many people use the same ID and password for their media accounts as they do for everything else,” he said, adding: “Bad guys will test email addresses en masse through automation and any of them that unlock, for instance, your Netflix or your pay TV account can be resold.”

Live programming is “just as vulnerable to theft” as on demand and cinema content, he went on to say. Live sports events are “most valuable at the very beginning of their run, so it’s really, really critical not only to identify that piracy – [but organizations also] only have minutes to stop it before that content begins to lose value,” he pointed out.

What is important to remember is that “piracy not only destroys the value of the content – it also destroys your business terms,” he said. If an organization has the rights to broadcast a live sports event only in certain markets, for instance, a pirate can make it available in other markets and that can “compromise your business relationship,” he said.

This is “a whole new world,” he said, calling it a “new land – we’re in a place where awareness is really just beginning.”