CDSA

For the past couple of months, the Media & Entertainment Information Sharing Analysis Center (ME-ISAC) has been busy preparing to launch a new and improved member portal, according to Chris Taylor, director of the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and managing director and founder of ME-ISAC.

He provided a demonstration of the new portal on April 26, during the latest ME-ISAC monthly meeting held the last Tuesday of each month. The April online event was held via the MESAverse platform and Zoom.

The new portal will take over distribution of ME-ISAC alerts and provide members with a way to get access to the archive of old alerts, talk about alerts and other news amongst themselves, and share intelligence, either directly to the community or to the ISAC so it can share it with the community.

ME-ISAC is also leveraging the portal as the primary collaboration means for all its working groups, providing a group chat capability, document repository and other features to enable those groups to work together.

“The Slack Channel that we have is still going to stay active,” Taylor told attendees, noting “that will stay a free resource for the entire community – you ” don’t have to be an ISAC member” to use the portal, he noted. “Invite all your friends. Get as many people in there as you want.”

But he added: “I will vet the attendees because we want them to be coming from media and entertainment companies, partially because we want to keep vendors out of there that are just trying to sell you something and partially to make sure that the conversations stay focused. So it has to be a work email but otherwise you can invite whoever you think you need to have a conversation with in there. Create whatever channels you want to be in there as well. If you need to have a private conversation you don’t want people stepping in on, you can create a channel and market as private, and then it’ll become invite only and you can only bring people in.”

He went on to explain: “So we’re leaving all that open as a free resource if anybody wants to run it. We’ll continue to curate it; it’s out there and available to you. I will continue to drop reports and notes and tidbits into the infosec channel as I’m working on alerts. But our alerts previously were manually created and then sent out through Mailchimp was the male mass distribution tool we were using. So we were just mailing our alerts out to people, and they were most likely going into your spam folder.”

That is changing. “What we’re going to do now is push them out through an alert portal that is designed specifically for curating and holding these alerts,” he explained. “This is going to give you a huge boost in the number of features that are available to the members who have access to the portal.”

There are now going to be separate tiers of access. Those who are still only at the free level, hanging out at Slack and don’t have access to the full portal can still be onboarded by ME-ISAC to get the alert distribution, Taylor said. “You’ll still get them via email the way that we always have. You just won’t be able to log into the portal to do all of the extra features that you’re about to see,” he noted, before providing a demo of the new portal.

Those who are “still at our community level are still going to be able to receive our alerts;  they just won’t see the archive [and] they won’t be able to collaborate with other members,” he pointed out.

During the portal demo, Taylor showed that the layout is changeable and different recipient groups “will receive different types of messages.”

For example, he explained, if there is an anti-piracy group that’s just focused on concern over pirates, tracking torrents, spoof websites and IPTV providers that are stealing content, they may not want to hear about vulnerability announcements. Although some may find learning about the latest IPTV streamers interesting, they don’t necessarily need that “clogging up the stream when they’re trying to work,” he said.

With the new portal, “we’re able now to be incredibly granular,” he said. In comparison, the old alert distribution had only about 3-4 categories and that automatically put people into one or more streams of alerts that ME-ISAC was pushing out, he noted.

Now, there are a dozen different categories and “you can sign up for one or three or all depending on how verbose you want the feed to be to you,” he said.

When data comes in now, portal visitors will see a tag at the top  saying what type of alert it is. Users can also control filters if they only want to see a particular category, he noted.

“If you see an alert that’s particularly interesting you want to talk about it, you have a question about it or if you just really liked an alert because it was incredibly pertinent to what you’re doing, there’s a feedback section … so you can tell us how relevant it was, how good was the content, or if you’ve got questions and want to talk to one of the ISAC analysts about it, you, can hit the contact analyst and drop in a comment and that’ll flag one of our analysts to come in and look at it and answer it back to you,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with the Anti-Piracy & Content Protection Summit 2022@NAB in Las Vegas on April 23, ME-ISAC announced a change to its logo, Taylor also noted during the April 26 meeting. “We’ve launched an update to the logo. An update to the website is in the wings and coming incredibly soon,” he said.

The next monthly ME-ISAC meeting is scheduled for May 31.

To learn more about ME-ISAC, click here.