M+E Daily

By Chris Tribbey

Hollywood, know your enemy. Better yet, know their motivations.

That’s part of the message Ralph Echemendia aims to deliver Dec. 12 at the Content Delivery & Security Association’s 4th annual Content Protection Summit (CPS) in Los Angeles.

“Hackers’ motives are either financial or trolling, and trolling is basically being a prick online,” the “ethical hacker” and CEO of digital content security firm Red-E Digital said. “Hollywood’s only concern isn’t just the financial impact of a movie or music leak, things of that nature. There’s also the trolling aspect, where they aren’t interested in your money in any way.”

Sometimes “trolls” are just huge fans, as was the case in 2011 when screen captures of dailies for Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 began leaking online, a case that Echemendia worked on. Key on-set personnel had their emails compromised, and through that “phishing,” the dailies were accessed.

“They had been accessing dailies for months before the leak occurred,” he said. “We busted a 21-year-old girl in Argentina who was a Twihard fan. She was the linker, and we had evidence she was logging in, viewing the dailies, going on a blog and leaking them.”

No monetary gain, no nefarious plots. Just a fan who couldn’t resist.

Echemendia will try to stress to CPS attendees just how much information for any one content project is out there, and thus vulnerable to leaks. He plans on sharing simple hacking tricks using Google, showing how things as simple as your email address and phone number can be used to infiltrate your project, and will emphasize just how sinister Trojan viruses can be. Prepare for some audience participation.

“I’m going to pull up Web sites they don’t even know are out there, sites that shouldn’t even be accessible on the Internet,” he said.

Echemendia will also touch on how Hollywood has embraced the influx of mobile devices in its business models, but hasn’t come close to closing all the potential security risks. “You’re talking about people not only having their iPhones and iPads, but now we’ve got Hollywood production solutions that are actually made to run on those, and you’re trusting what you’re seeing, where it’s coming from,” he said. “All of that can be intercepted, very easily.

“There are a lot of different ways we’re trusting these mobile devices and platforms for use in production workflows that are concerning here. All of these attacks that we’re seeing are a result of manipulating technologies that we trust.”

Echemendia’s presentation (“Hacking Hollywood: Behind the Eyes of A Troll”) is one of more than a dozen on the slate at CPS, headlined by a keynote from “The Walking Dead” executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, Hollywood’s “First Lady of Sci-Fi.”

For the full schedule and registration, visit contentprotectionsummit.com/2013/conference-program/