A recent study shows that only one percent of media companies are really confident in their current cybersecurity measures. The report titled ‘The State of Media Security,” published by Akamai of the CDN (Content Delivery Network), a service company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts has issued the new findings.
The report, based on a survey conducted by BizTechInsights and covering 200 media industry leaders, addresses key security issues; the survey attempted to find out how media companies are addressing the ever-growing number of security threats. The report prominently covers three key areas. It discusses the most common kinds of attacks media organizations face and also focuses on strategies used by media companies to protect themselves against such attacks. The report also focuses on the concerns relating to protecting an online video business.
An Akamai press release discussing the report says- “Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, has released new research in a report titled, “The State of Media Security.” Based on a survey of 200 U.S. media technology influencers and decision makers conducted by BizTechInsights, the report aims to evaluate and better understand how media companies are securing their online properties. Among key findings is that slow site performance and downtime is the number one security-related concern among media leaders.”
The Akamai report says that the media industry’s top security-related concerns are slow site performance and downtime; 26% of the respondents in the survey have this opinion. The other concerns include protecting premium video content, enterprise application security, managing the impact of bot traffic, DDoS mitigation etc.
The report also says that top security concerns for the media industry go beyond protecting content and tend to present real dangers to the media business. Hence all business and IT leaders in the media industry need to pay attention to cybersecurity.
The report also discusses the types of security breaches that the industry encounters; these include SQL injections (23 percent), DNS attacks (21 percent), pirated content (20 percent) and distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks (17 percent). The list also includes account hacks, website defacement, and cross-site scripting.
Media companies today fight DDoS attacks using different technologies; these include having network firewalls in their data centers (31 percent of respondents), dedicated DDoS mitigation “scrubbers” (26 percent), data center-based intrusion prevention systems (17 percent), and ISP-based DDoS mitigation (11 percent). The report also discusses how media organizations manage bot traffic. The Akamai press release says- “A surprising one-third (33 percent) of survey respondents reported that they employ a manual process of investigating logs and blocking individual IP addresses to address bot traffic, while 45 percent of respondents leverage an existing firewall, and one percent don’t do anything at all. Only one in five respondents (22 percent) leverage a purpose-built bot management solution, revealing the widespread risk of bot-based threats like credential exploitation to circumvent attacks or steal content.”
The other aspect discussed in the report is media companies defending themselves against web application attacks; the report says that a vast majority of media companies (84 percent) report using a web application firewall for this while only 16 percent rely on application security audits and testing.
Dave Lewis, senior global security advocate at Akamai says- “Media companies are online businesses, operating websites and maintaining a wide variety of proprietary and sensitive information. They need to broaden their perspective on security and look closely at approaches like zero trust architectures and protecting enterprise applications to secure their content along with everything around it”. He adds- “Steps are being taken to address common threats like DDoS, bots and web application attacks, but almost none of the media influencers we surveyed are very confident their organizations are protected, indicating that businesses have a long way to go on the security front. At a broader level, it’s going to take media companies coming together as a community to establish forums, industry standards, and closer connections with government bodies to move the confidence needle and create a more security-aware and protected industry across the board.”
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