M+E Daily

CPS 2021: IBM Security Talks Zero Trust, Synamedia Tackles Piracy Sites

At the Dec. 16 Content Protection Summit event, IBM Security and Synamedia kicked the day off with messages covering both the adoption of zero trust principles and the many ways to go about beating back content piracy.

First up was Alden Hutchison, partner with IBM Security, one of the leaders in covering every corner of the zero trust world. His presentation — “Adopting Zero Trust – What is it, What’s Working and What Isn’t” covered why a zero trust approach is proving so important to media and entertainment, thanks to its highly collaborative business and use of perimeter-less environments with shared ownership and control.

To protect its assets, all corners of M&E can make use of zero trust in an incremental, iterative way to implement controls in order to verify and enforce security every step of the way.

“The threat actors are getting more sophisticated, finding more opportunities to get a foothold in organizations,” Hutchison said. “We have so many surface-level threats.”

He stressed that “zero trust isn’t a product, you can’t buy it off the shelf.”

And it’s not just about making sure the right users have the right access to just the right data, it’s covering all corners of all those steps, including managing devices and cloud services, adaptive authentications, privileged access management, data and file activity monitoring, and, of course, going into it all assuming a breach is already underway.

“It’s a set of principles you align to your product, it’s something that’s going to evolve,” Hutchison said. Zero trust may be simple in concept, but you “have to put in the work.”

“There are projects that touch every part of the organization,” he said. “You have to collaborate closely across all teams.”

Meanwhile, Justin Caple, VP of sales and accounts for the Americas at Synamedia, detailed a step everyone in the M&E ecosystem needs to take to combat piracy: know your enemy.

“What’s their motivation? Once we know the personas, we can go after them,” he said.

Sharing insights from the company’s “Tackling Sports Piracy in an IP World” report, Caple noted that it all starts with sports content, “the gateway to all other pirated content.”

The report finds that 83 percent of sports fans (watching sports at least weekly) access illegal pirate streams weekly, and 10 percent of all sports fans are watching illegal services every week
but aren’t paying for a legal service. Just under 50 percent of lower-income fans will go to a illegal service first, because they don’t want to pay.

“They know it’s wrong, and they don’t care,” Caple said. “They know there’s consequences, and it doesn’t bother them.”

One of the first steps for combating illegal streaming: make it less rewarding, however you possibly can.

Find ways to delay illegal streaming of sports content, removing the live benefits. Disrupt the video quality to make it nearly unwatchable. Make the audio hurt to listen to. “Screw around with their experience,” Caple said.

Synamedia’s report found that there’s interconnected proof that content illegal consumption extends between sports and other premium content. It’s understanding these trends that helps inform the anti-piracy strategy of all rights holders, broadcasters, and OTT platform owners.

The Content Protection Summit was open to remote attendees worldwide using MESA’s recently introduced metaverse environment, the Rendez.Vu-powered MESAverse, an interactive 3D-world that allows for hybrid live and virtual events.

The event was produced by MESA, presented by IBM Security and Synamedia, sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, PacketFabric, archTIS, Code42, INTRUSION, NAGRA, StoneTurn and Vision Media.