Helping giants to fight online fraud

Last updated on: April 26, 2023

As new forms of infringement emerge and evolve, dealing with piracy has become increasingly challenging for companies that create valuable content, especially for those in the software and entertainment industries.

From illegal streaming and downloads to illicit use of torrent services, peer-to-peer sites, messaging apps, social media, and video platforms, content owners are exposed daily to high levels of sophisticated infringements across the internet. 

In recent years, there has been no shortage of new piracy challenges for brands to tackle. For instance, new techniques used by infringers include cookie sharing, which is a mechanism to access subscription platforms and services via search engine plugins that bypass platforms’ traditional login methods.

With this in mind, it goes without saying that these methods pose a significant threat to the online security and privacy of countless entertainment companies around the world, making it extremely challenging for them to tackle this issue alone.

Additionally, today’s fast-changing ecommerce landscape means that detection and enforcement only represent one aspect of the equation when it comes to safeguarding content. To truly address piracy, taking proactive measures is often the most effective strategy. This involves identifying new piracy tactics, such as illicit sites, keywords, and misspellings, as well as monitoring the behaviour of new cyberlockers for any signs of complaints or breaches before they go mainstream. 

In recent years, a popular piracy trend among infringers has been to use popular domain names in various languages to name their apps and provide unauthorized access to content. One of the methods we use to discover such piracy trends is by monitoring the names of well-known piracy websites in different languages. This helps us to uncover illegal apps at scale.

Additionally, social media is another fast-growing channel that pauses a real threat to content owners. Because most of our clients are not able to access private groups on social media, we perform forensic analysis within these groups to uncover any illicit activities taking place and identify new keywords and trends for our clients. Once we spot them, we capture screenshots and videos to provide them with a complete understanding of how their content is being exploited. This enables them to take the necessary steps to safeguard their brand.

At Red Points, data intelligence sits at the heart of our services and is a key component of how we support right-holders with ongoing and future piracy threats.

Providing our 1,200 clients access to a world-class team, relevant industry know-how, new online distribution trends, and technology is our winning formula to success. 

How Red Points is combating piracy for one of the world’s largest entertainment companies

That is why, since 2016, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world partnered with Red Points to protect its content online. 

Aside from providing them with efficient ways to enforce their intellectual property at scale, our team also gives them greater visibility into the latest piracy trends, so that they can mitigate both today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

The results of this collaboration speak for themselves. 

Given the popularity and global reach of their content, we deploy thousands of keywords daily to crawl domains worldwide and extract links from social media platforms, video platforms, torrents, cyberlockers, marketplaces, forums, peer-to-peer sites, and both official and non-official app stores to protect over 50 of their most popular movies. 

However, because pirates never cease to look for new ways to go undetected, we cannot afford to get complacent. That’s why we never stop exploring new channels by crawling outside of traditional search engines to detect non-indexed domains, mirror sites, etc. This, combined with our self-improving machine learning technology, allows us to process a large volume of piracy links retrieved online to recommend new keywords and follow infringers’ tracers fast, wherever they go. 

As a result, in 2022 alone we have detected more than 3,5 million infringements over more than 16k different domains for our anti-piracy clients, and have reached an all-time high of 89% for our Enforcement Success Rate. 

However, our work doesn’t end there.

On a daily basis, our team of anti-piracy experts collate data intelligence that gives our clients deep insight into global digital piracy distribution and consumption trends. 

One such example includes providing our clients with a landscape of top domains to watch by analyzing their average traffic volume, unique visitors, number of clicks required in order to access the content (AKA advertising annoyance), and other relevant metrics that indicate the severity of the domain’s piracy activity. That way our clients have a clear understanding of where piracy is occurring, allowing them to make informed decisions on how to combat piracy and prioritize their efforts effectively.

Recently, one other common technique used by pirates to evade detection has been to re-direct audiences from one domain to another, that’s why at Red Points we constantly track these types of activities to ensure we always monitor the most up-to-date database of domains. 

All in all, as the online space becomes more complex, it’s never been more important for brands to be equipped with data on how pirates operate, new distribution channels, and evasion techniques in order to enrich their understanding of the piracy landscape. 

By delivering those key insights to our clients from a wide range of sources, we provide them with actionable intel to inform their long-term business strategies, brand protection efforts and ultimately gain a complete picture of the online market.