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Cybersecurity in the Entertainment and Media Industries

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How does the news reach the world when any enterprise suffers from a data breach or other malicious incident? We all know that the media and entertainment industry play an important role in this. But what happens when the media industry itself is affected? Not only the media industry but the whole world gets disturbed. Cybersecurity is really necessary for this!

A couple of years ago, the hack of a famous media and entertainment company occurred, and it resulted in lost data, major impacts on productivity and operations, and embarrassing leaks. Content security has been the most important factor in the media and entertainment industries. Here, content is the lifeblood of many media and entertainment enterprises, not just intellectual property. Theft of content can have a major impact on the profits that a particular artist can generate and the reputation of the companies involved.

Media and entertainment companies are not even safe from the cybersecurity challenges of other consumer-facing industries. They also face issues in protecting customer data, demonstrating compliance, improving operational efficiency, and avoiding downtime. They may even operate at temporary locations like entertainment venues or pop-up retail operations. In all these instances, cyberattacks on the media and entertainment industries can cause great damage to the guest experience and have a serious impact on the bottom line.

This blog is all about cybersecurity challenges, risks, security measures, and much more in the media and entertainment industry.

Let's dig in!

Media and Entertainment Cybersecurity Challenges

Content Security
Content is the most important property for the media and entertainment industry. Various completed products, such as music files, videos, and movies, are included in the content along with the material that is never intended to be public, such as scripts, contract negotiations, scenes that wind up on the cutting room floor, and proposed content that is never produced. For the media and entertainment industry, it is a necessary job to protect proprietary content after Sony was attacked by nation-state actors. Contravention of content affects companies negatively, and the release of confidential content can affect their brand reputation as well as the reputation of the artists they are working with.

Protecting Customer Data
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and standards like the Payment Card Industry Software Security Framework (PCI SSF) are the regulations that are truly important for media and entertainment organizations. Most of them are in possession of the personal information of zillions of customers through relatively small transactions. Companies must be able to demonstrate compliance with multiple regulations and standards without redeploying staff from strategic initiatives to prepare audit reports.

Customer Experience
It is necessary to focus heavily on the customer experience because of digital innovation in the media and entertainment industry. The reason for this is the rapid consumer adoption of streaming services, online gaming, and even virtual reality. These services are heavily dependent on cloud-based services, IoT devices, and mobile networks, and interruption in service can negatively affect the company's brand reputation.

Visibility
To enhance the customer experience, most of the media and entertainment organizations have implied cutting-edge technology. Because of this, the attack surface is growing and making it even more difficult to protect the cybersecurity. The adoption of services and applications in multiple clouds and the increased use of mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for things like ticket scanning make the network more complex. As media and entertainment industries are continuously deploying more and more security product points to reduce the gaps created by the increased attack surface, the problem is aggravated. The resulting security will blur the visibility, increase the operational inefficiencies and raise the risk.

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The IT Risks

From electronic modes to digital modes, the media and entertainment industries have come a long way where production houses migrate their broadcasting services towards online content and streaming services. As a result, there is a rise in the risk of hacking, data theft, and potential damage to reputation every day.

Below are some of the predominant IT security threats that can damage the enterprise beyond recovery.

Insider Threats
It bears the high risk of leaking critical information to file-sharing servers as the insiders have easy and regular access to the "not-yet-released" content. It even increases the risk as, most of the time, media and entertainment organizations lack any seamless user monitoring mechanism.

Cyber Sabotage
To steal important data, spoil reputation, manipulate information about terrorism or spread baseless rumors, groups of hacktivists or organized cyber-criminal groups attack media companies. Companies face real pain dealing with the consequences of such incidents.

Inadequate Public Scrutiny
Thousands of public emails are inboxed in companies' official emails every day. It could be service feedback, service requests, complaints, and more. In the case of running contests, companies check responses in emails to decide the winners. Phishing threats loom large here. A potentially harmful email in disguise as an appreciation email could be disastrous if opened and clicked.

State-sponsored Threats
Government-authorized ethical hacktivists compromise each access point in order to stop the spread of controversial entertaining content. On certain occasions, media companies have to face legal consequences as well in this regard, as well as face financial and reputational drawbacks.

Non-Compliance
For each industry, including the media and entertainment, the rules and regulations of global compliance standards are applicable. Hence, in the event of any data threat incident, the company could surely be charged with non-compliance penalties. It increases financial stress and has negative effects on the business's future.

Security Measures for Cybersecurity

It is critical to protect cybersecurity in the media and entertainment industry because a huge number of users are habituated today to online services. Hence, a robust IT security is the only key to staying protected from the predominant cyber threats.

  • Constant monitoring of the end-users accounts round can assist the enterprises in keeping a track of who is accessing crucial information at what time and for what reason.
  • It is highly crucial to have a proper prioritization as well as segregation of data assets. Not only this but also determining the access control mechanism of every database as per rule and role can diminish the risk of unauthorized access.
  • It is compulsory to have a robust mechanism to authorize and authenticate the user before allowing access to ensure secure access.
  • All the privileged sets of identities that are gateways to most confidential information such as action plans for streaming services, upcoming productions, etc. should have a 'Just-In-Time' privilege policy to ensure privileged access only when it is required and not round the clock. It strengthens access control policy and protects confidential data.
  • To keep enterprises away from cyber attacks, it is mandatory to follow global compliance by following the best IT security practices.

In Conclusion
Many media and entertainment enterprises now operate across multiple public and private clouds. In most cases, organizations take the "path of least resistance" and rely on each cloud provider's suite of security tools. The outcome is different security for each cloud and no connection between the security architectures of the hybrid cloud and the on-premises infrastructure. In the long term, it will critically reduce operational efficiency while diminishing security.

It is critical to protect cybersecurity for the media and entertainment industries, meaning that the enterprise's integrated security architecture must extend from the data center to multiple clouds. Tools that protect the various clouds must seamlessly connect the whole infrastructure, from the data center to the cloud.

Sennovate Cloud Security Solutions empower media and entertainment companies to confidently deploy any application in any cloud at any time. Seamless integration and consistent procedures across the entire infrastructure increase efficiencies for cybersecurity teams while reducing cybersecurity risk to the organization.

Wrapping up
Hope this blog helps you to understand how to Architect an IAM solution for your startups and the benefits of IAM solution. Creating an effective IAM program goes beyond simply monitoring network access and updating users' accounts. Sennovate is partner with various IAM solutions like Gluu, Forgerock, and others. Is your company ready to build an identity and access management architecture? Sennovate's experts are here to help you.

Having any doubts or want to have a call with us to know more about IAM solutions for your organization?
Contact us right now by clicking here, Sennovate's Experts will explain everything on call in detail.
You can also write a mail to us at hello@sennovate.com or call us on +1 (925) 918–6565.

About Sennovate
Sennovate delivers custom identity and access management (IAM) and managed security operations center (SOC) solutions to businesses around the world. With global partners and a library of 2000+ integrations, 10M+ identities managed, we implement world-class cybersecurity solutions that save your company time and money. We offer a seamless experience with integration across all cloud applications, and a single price for product, implementation, and support. Have questions? The consultation is always free. Email hello@sennovate.com or call us at: +1 (925) 918–6565.

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