CDSA

Piracy continues to be a major challenge for the media and entertainment industry but African entertainment company MultiChoice was able to significantly cut down on it and lessen the impact it had on its business, according to Greg van Wyngaard, system architect at African entertainment company MultiChoice’s Connected Video division.

Piracy can have a major impact on an operator’s ability to serve its subscribers, he said Oct. 20 during the session “MultiChoice Blocks Unwanted Guests, Frees Up Capacity and Unlocks New Subscribers: The Inside Story” on day two of the first Video Security Summit. Piracy leads to money being wasted and resources being eaten up, he noted.

James Clark, managing director of GeoGuard at GeoComply, started the session by noting that the effect of piracy on an operator’s infrastructure are: a weakening of its ability to serve honest users, increased costs and hidden threats.

Speaking from his experience blocking thousands of geo-pirates, van Wyngaard shared the various techniques MultiChoice deployed to free up infrastructure resources and cut content delivery network (CDN) loads to better serve the company’s legitimate users. These initiatives can also unlock new subscribers.

He also covered topics including the hidden costs of hijacked residential Internet Protocols (IPs) and how MultiChoice has optimized its infrastructure to keep pirates out.

Credential sharing and stealing continues to represent a “very big, very real, very ongoing problem,” he said, adding: “I think we’re all working towards it in terms of how to prevent it. But it’s an ongoing fight.”

The vast majority of people stealing credentials are using a VPN and are looking to steal and distribute content, he said, noting: “Almost every single case we’ve investigated is using some form of VPN.”

So one important step that the company took to fight back against pirates was blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), he said.

There were “multiple effects” being seen from additional connections to its service that were not legitimate, he recalled.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic increased viewership, the company was seeing even more consumption than just that extra viewing on its service, he said, noting that was placing an additional load on its infrastructure.

When data usage started climbing into the terabytes and petabytes each month, it was “getting a bit out of hand,” to say the least, he said.

The company saw content being served to markets where it shouldn’t be and didn’t match up with where the requests were coming from, he recalled. That “highlighted where we needed to pick up the game” in figuring out where requests for service were coming from so it could “put more robust solutions” in place to stop it.

“Thank you, GeoGuard,” he added with a laugh, noting his company used GeoComply’s GeoGuard protection solution that helps detect when people are trying to spoof a location via methods that include VPNs and proxies.

MultiChoice “started implementing the solution and we started activating strict geo-controls and strict VPN” location technology about 18 months ago, he said, noting that the number of new, unique IP addresses tumbled from about 50,000 to only about 6,000 now in an average month. “So it has petered off significantly,” he added.

“Being able to reduce our attack surface helps narrow where we can get attacked  from a pirates’ perspective” and other malicious attacks also, he told viewers. Contracts typically spell out what geo-locations a company can provide service to and which are restricted, he noted.

The solution his company has used to crack down on piracy is “not foolproof by any means,” he conceded. After all, if there was a 100% effective way to eliminate all piracy, there might not be the need for an event like the Video Security Summit, he pointed out. “But every little bit helps,” he added.

“The more we can keep out the bad actors out there, the better we can scale and the better we can optimize for legitimate users,” he explained.

One clear takeaway from the session was that that just seeing huge traffic numbers is not good in and of itself for operators and other legitimate service providers, he noted. That is because much of that traffic could be comprised of people who are not paying for the service and it’s costing tons of money to serve them.

His parting recommendations were: Always understand where your data is coming from and reduce the attack surface area by restricting regions whenever possible.