Cyber Security: Tips For Broadcasters

Cyber Security

While the digital era has brought significant advances in technology, it has also opened the doorway to continuously evolving threats in the media and broadcast industry. Over 30% of media and broadcasting companies admit that they have experienced a cyber-attack of some kind or the other.
In 2015, five unreleased Sony Pictures’ movies – Annie, Fury, Still Alice, Mr. Turner and To Write Love on Her Arms –made their way onto torrent file-sharing websites. French broadcaster TV5Monde’s TV channels and social media accounts were hacked by a nation-state hacker in January 2015, costing the TV station millions of Euros.

In October 2016, Internet infrastructure company Dyn was hacked, affecting broadcast companies like CNN, HBO, Amazon, Yelp, and the Wall Street Journal.

Recently, in 2017, an anonymous hacker leaked some of the scripts and unaired episodes of Game of Thrones’ seventh season from HBO. The email from the hacker claimed a leak 1.5 terabyte of raw data from HBO.

Vulnerabilities and threats

The common security vulnerabilities and threats faced by the media and broadcast companies are as follows:

  • Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS): This attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth of the targeted system with traffic
  • Signal piracy: World Intellectual Protocol Organization (WIPO) internet treaties that would outlaw the breaking of anti-piracy locks on digital signals such as encryption and ‘tagging.’
  • The Cloud: The threat of data breaches and compromised credentials and account hijacking are some of the major threats to data on the cloud
  • Connected Devices (TV): More and more IoT enabled devices are setting up paths for ways to launch cyber attacks
  • Data leakage: the collection and monetization of an online publisher’s audience data by a third party without the publisher’s permission
  • Vendor System Vulnerabilities: Maintaining security standards across multiple vendors across the media value chain is difficult to achieve
  • Malware Attacks: (Malicious software) or a program code designed to harm a computer or its data
  • Ransomware Attacks: A form of malware in which the user’s computer files are encrypted. A ransom is demanded to restore the system or device to normal use
  • Piracy: Broadcasters can think of simultaneous global broadcasting as a solution to tackle TV piracy.

How to avoid cyber-attacks?

  • Monitor the social media accounts of the hacktivist campaigns that are relevant to your industry
  • Proactively monitor for credential dumps relevant to your organization’s account
  • Monitor for the latest IE and Flash vulnerabilities and ensure your site is patched
  • Understand which ransomware variants are targeting your industry, which delivery methods are most popular, and the CVEs the hackers target
  • Monitor for the registration of typo-squatted domains