to ensure it is detected and taken down before any significant financial losses are incurred. Scale, scope and automation all have a key role to play in enabling rapid action – given the sheer number of illicit sources, delivery platforms, apps and devices that pirates use, as well as the speed leaked content spreads through extensive pirate networks. At the same time, platform design vulnerabilities need to be addressed to prevent content from getting into illicit channels. Issues such as a lack of DRM key rotation, session binding, deprecated CDM revocation and account fraud analysis all need to be taken into account. Cybersecurity should be a focus for any organisation operating in the digital world. Cyberattacks to obtain sensitive IP and information for the purposes of blackmail, extortion or reputational damage are an ongoing threat and for the M&E industry. Fraudulent, for-profit credentials sharing is a growing issue.
Cybersecurity should be a focus for any organisation working in the digital world
FEED: COULD YOU OFFER AN EXAMPLE OF A SECURITY BREACH YOU FEEL BROADCASTERS COULD LEARN FROM?
ROBIN BOLDON: A common OTT distribution breach we see is when a service provider is relying solely on the use of DRM to protect premium content, with absolutely no consideration given to restricting access to the actual video content – in technical terms, the manifest and segments. This means if a pirate is able to extract the decryption key from a DRM licence, the content can be readily accessed from the CDN and decrypted by any user. This problem is then further exacerbated by infrequent key rotation; in other words, the keys remain unchanged for months at a time, and the same key issued to protect multiple linear channels and across multiple adaptive bit rate (ABR) ladder variants, which is very good news for pirates because it makes it all too convenient to ‘hack once and hack all.’
MIKE MULREADY: Irdeto Cyber Services team contributed to the shutdown of Mobdro, the world’s largest illegal streaming app. Modbro had a large catalogue of live TV and video content from around the globe – including live sports, gaming, music, podcasts as well as several VOD channels airing TV series and movies 24/7 to more than 100 million users. This journey wasn’t easy, but rather a lengthy process with much investigative work and collaboration with the Premier League, La Liga and law enforcement agencies in Spain, Andorra and Portugal dating back to 2018. Research estimates Modbro’s overall illegal profits at more than €5 million, affecting many rights owners and broadcasters (including many of our customers), so it is extremely rewarding to see our contribution led to its shutdown.
Irdeto has previously assisted one of our clients to tackle a worldwide piracy incident where our customers channels were made available on a pirate set-top-box and sold in many countries. The pirates rebranded the channels and added their own commercial breaks. This made it hard for the consumer to differentiate between official and unofficial content. Irdeto has worked to remove advertisements of these devices, investigated how the content was being stolen, having rebroadcasted and assisted in placing features to prevent these pirates from stealing the channels. Irdeto also identified some of the people behind this operation and captured key evidence, which enabled our client to commence litigation. This resulted in the shutdown of this pirate network, which was causing commercial harm to our client.
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