Content Security: safeguarding your digital assets

Words Katie Kasperson

Our increasingly globalised world does have many advantages: cultural exchange, greater economic access, remote connection. But as technology allows us to expand our reach – streaming video internationally, for instance – it also opens us to threat. Coupled with the fact that, thanks to generative AI, we are living in a world where what is ‘real’ can be difficult to discern, content authenticity and anti-piracy are more important than ever. In short, cybersecurity specialists have their hands full.

Legacy broadcast technology was relatively secure; data could only be stolen if someone had physical access to the hardware on which it was stored. Now, with cloud-native storage and streaming, anyone – from anywhere in the world – can hack the software, provided they have the skills to do so.

“Today, we put quadruple the effort into ensuring security than we did ten, 12 years ago,” begins Jon Corley, CTO at Wowza. “More threats abound,” he says, such as pre-release leaks, illegal re-streaming, signal hijacking and content manipulation to name a few. As networks scale up, so too do potential vulnerabilities in the supply chain. Protecting content today means firming up those weak spots – and basic encryption is no longer enough.

Lessons learned

In 2017, HBO faced two simultaneous leaks, in which unreleased Game of Thrones episodes (the network’s flagship series, then at its peak popularity) became temporarily, publicly available. One leak stemmed from an external attack on HBO’s servers, where those responsible demanded millions of dollars in bitcoin; the other was a result of pure human error, where HBO Nordic and HBO España accidentally uploaded an episode of the show days ahead of schedule.

Then, in 2024, the same thing happened with several Netflix, Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime Video series (including Squid Game, an international phenomenon, originally filmed in Korean). This time, there was no direct hack; the breach occurred via Iyuno, a third-party localisation, subtitling and dubbing vendor that had been handling various streaming titles.

While there are plenty of other examples out there, these alone demonstrate how a data breach happens – and how no two look the same. Modern attacks exploit whatever they can, whether it’s lodging ransomware on HBO’s media servers or targeting a third-party supplier.

These events have served as learning experiences for cybersecurity specialists. “The worst-case scenario is no longer that someone breaks the encryption; it’s that a legitimate playback session is stolen and shared at scale,” states James Hynard, business development manager – content distribution and security at Castlabs. “That’s why the industry needs to think beyond traditional DRM” – short for digital rights management, which is designed to prevent piracy. “Protecting the encryption key remains essential, but we also need to protect the delivery session itself,” Hynard adds.

Protecting against piracy

Piracy isn’t new; it’s just gotten easier. While today’s pirates don’t exactly resemble the swashbuckling rogues we might imagine, content theft and re-distribution is certainly alive and well, albeit done behind closed doors. In the US, the FBI’s Anti-Piracy Warning Seal appears on copyrighted materials, such as home media, and explains that offenders may face prison time. However, although the punishment may fit the crime, it doesn’t prevent it from happening.

“For a long time,” says Hynard, “the industry’s focus was on preventing premium content from being decrypted or copied. Today, we’re seeing the problem shift from protecting the content itself to protecting the playback session.”

While multi-DRM approaches have been largely successful in preventing leaks, they can’t do much to stop live screen-scraping. “An attacker only needs to authenticate once, obtain a valid playback session, extract a CDN access token and then redistribute it to thousands of unauthorised viewers,” explains Hynard. (CDN, in this case, stands for content delivery network.) “From the CDN’s perspective, those requests often look entirely legitimate, making them difficult to distinguish from paying customers in real time.”

Castlabs, which provides software and cloud services to the digital media industry, is working on a solution to this exact issue, blending high-frequency DRM key rotations with short-lived CDN access tokens. “Working with partners, we’ve developed a proof of concept that enables DRM keys to rotate rapidly without the overhead traditionally associated,” Hynard says. “We’re extending that approach so each DRM licence renewal becomes the trust anchor for issuing a fresh, short-lived CDN access token.

“Instead of authorising access once at the start of playback, trust can be continuously renewed throughout the session. If a key or CDN token is compromised, its useful lifetime is measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours, dramatically reducing its value to pirates while making large-scale CDN leeching significantly more difficult.”

While piracy is a content security threat first and foremost, it is also a commercial one. “It’s no longer just about lost subscription revenue; operators are also paying the hidden cost of CDN leeching, where stolen playback sessions are used to consume content directly from the operator’s own CDN,” Hynard says. “Every unauthorised stream generates CDN egress, origin traffic and infrastructure costs while producing no revenue. At scale, this becomes a content security issue and a significant operational cost.”

Take the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the largest tournament to date. Forty-eight teams competed in stadiums across North America, and 6.8 million fans attended the matches. But for those who couldn’t be there in person, they tuned in via broadcast, handled by Fox and Telemundo in the US, Bell Media in Canada, and Televisa and TV Azteca in Mexico. Peacock streamed all 104 games to its subscribers too.

The latest World Cup was also a commercial success, generating $8.9bn in revenue (as estimated by FIFA) – and that includes the $485m Fox paid for media rights. Video piracy, however, ran rampant, with the US government seizing over 1000 websites that were streaming matches illegally and, in some cases, trying to turn a profit. While the anti-piracy initiative Operation Offsides caught thousands of copyright-infringement criminals, it didn’t prevent them from stealing content in the first place – and that is where cybersecurity should be heading.

Castlab’s approach builds on infrastructure that operators already have. “There’s no requirement to re-encrypt media segments, modify payloads or introduce expensive edge computing. We’re extending existing DRM workflows to continuously validate both content access and CDN authorisation, allowing operators to strengthen security while preserving standards-based deployments,” Hynard adds.

Alternative anti-piracy approaches, meanwhile, include session-based forensic watermarking – where invisible identifiers trace illegal re-streams back to the exact subscriber or device – and geo-fencing, which blocks traffic from certain IP addresses, even if they are using a VPN. These measures, though, don’t always work and are often reactive rather than preventative. “As streaming continues to grow, the operators who continuously validate trust throughout playback – rather than only at login – will be better positioned to protect premium content, reduce unnecessary CDN costs and preserve the economics of their streaming services,” Hynard concludes.

Fake news?

Whether your content is safe is one thing; whether it’s even real is another. The rapid rise of generative AI – which can create totally fake yet lifelike videos – has transformed content moderation, particularly in broadcast workflows, into a critical obstacle. Traditionally, human reviewers would evaluate footage manually, which was often a tedious process. Yet in our relentless quest for efficiency, coupled with the sheer volume and variety of incoming content, we are primed to miss the signs that a video is synthetic.

For news broadcasters and others in high-stakes industries, sharing AI-generated content can undermine credibility at best. “If you’re going to put information out there, you want it to be as valid as possible – and there are no guarantees anymore that that’s going to be the case,” says Corley. That’s why content provenance and authenticity are essential; provenance records a video’s origin, history and movements, while authenticity verifies that it hasn’t been altered artificially. By moderating at the moment of ingest – rather than after distribution – organisations can reject manipulated content in real time.

Wowza’s latest partnership with NVIDIA allows for exactly this; the company’s Video Intelligence Framework (VIF) now includes NVIDIA’s Synthetic Video Detector, so its customers can flag AI-generated video in-stream, before it goes live and does any damage.

“Once you purchase a VIF licence, it will take a stream and start to run inference on it with a model that’s provided by the customer,” Corley explains. “The customer, more or less, would train that model to detect scenes or objects in a stream that they’re looking for.” With the synthetic video detector, it works in largely the same way. “That model, in real time, is able to detect whether or not a stream is real.”

According to a report by Surfshark, synthetic video has caused major financial losses in the media and broadcast sector, with impersonations of public figures driving a net loss of $400m alone. In other industries, AI-generated videos have been used to trigger unnecessary emergency responses, fabricate crimes and interfere with biometrics – with consequences far beyond simply being misinformed.

“The pressure is coming down on everybody,” admits Corley. “We all face a common enemy at this point: malware and misintent. AI definitely increases that risk, and staying on top of that is becoming more and more key.”

Ironically, AI is being used to improve cybersecurity too. “AI can hurt you and help you,” Corley states. “You can’t just connect AI to anything and let it rip. I could tell AI to go and look at my code and find vulnerabilities before they ever become released. The number of bugs we have today is significantly lower, due in part to that. But security has to be top of mind.”

We’ve got options

Cybersecurity attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated – and they are only going to get worse. AI will likely play a big part, driving stream-scraping, automated account takeovers and signal manipulation using deepfakes. The industry needs a coordinated defence strategy that prevents these breaches altogether.

“Looking ahead, the biggest challenge is in recognising that content security and session security have become equally important,” argues Hynard. Approaches like Castlabs’ continuous token authentication, coupled with multi-DRM deployments, are one way to protect video at the point of playout.

Another option is to apply zero-trust architecture to the entire video pipeline, verifying every frame, every token and never trusting a given account, device or IP address. It is certainly a strict, cynical approach and one that potentially decreases productivity, but it mitigates both internal and external threats and better protects remote and hybrid workflows.   

Finally, forensic watermarking, while reactive, ensures that any video pirate will be caught red-handed. This is especially useful for high-value media such as live sports, big-budget films and flagship TV series – particularly those that haven’t yet been released. This protects creators from copyright infringement and ensures they are paid their fair share – because while a security breach might sound bad, no one wants to be short-changed.

This article appeared in our IBC 2026 issue