How to Keep Content Secure in the Age of Super Hacks

By Peter Lambert, Sales Director - EditShare

Hacks cost the media and entertainment industry hundreds of millions of dollars in unrecoverable asset monetization and many professionals could potentially lose their job and even careers as a result of these significant losses. Sony Pictures, HBO and Netflix have all suffered from stolen content and major losses. Today, media facilities all over the world are looking at ways of preventing hacks and securing their lucrative content.

Though the risk of hacking can never be completely eliminated, having a “digital audit trail” of all file activities can deter and significantly reduce attempts at stealing valuable content. Anecdotal evidence suggests, in most cases, high-value content is stolen from within the facility and is then released to the Internet; this is one of the main reasons why high-quality video leaks appear online. And this is why securing the storage infrastructure and creating audit trails is a number one priority for many media and creative facilities in 2018.

Detecting suspicious activity often requires simultaneous monitoring of multiple systems; for example, physical access systems and user logins. SIEM (short for Security Information and Event Management) is the practice of combining information from multiple systems to more quickly and more accurately identify security threats by aggregating log data from network, security, servers, databases, applications and correlating events into meaningful bundles. It’s EditShare’s belief that each digital touch of a file should be recorded, should that be copying, deleting or amending a file, thus keeping a digital footprint record of the all activity of the media content within a facility.

Clients and facilities are required to meet the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) auditing requirements. Some studios, such as those producing content for Disney or Marvel Studios, have even more stringent requirements to protect their high-value content. The best practices set forth by the MPAA (don’t lose content; don’t let someone steal content; if content is lost or stolen, report it immediately; don’t let security measures disrupt production) directly tie into the EditShare XStream EFS storage auditing capabilities. In terms of media storage security, auditing is critical and beyond the MPAA, there is a growing need to protect intellectual property rights and recognize that content security precautions are a necessary part of a healthy global information economy and EditShare is pioneering this path.

Through file auditing, media organizations can optimize data security by auditing every media space, every file opened, read, moved, accessed or deleted and every attempted user log-in or log-out, regardless of the outcome. If anyone copies a file, it is traceable to the user. Instead of swamping administrators with a tsunami of log file data, the EditShare’s File Auditing application provides tool and reports to narrow down activities by time frame (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks), by user, by IP address and by file event type. With EFS File Auditing capabilities, EditShare is leading the way for media organizations to better protect themselves and their assets.