‘Black spot’ for pirates

Wanted: a person in Europe or the US to film a video on an iPhone, urgent. Payment — $ 200. Time — 2 hours. Details — in a private message.” On the morning of a premiere, someone who wants to earn $ 200 will go to their local cinema and film the movie on their smartphone. The translation into Russian will take a few hours and at about 7:00 p.m. (Moscow time) a pirated copy in CAMRip will appear in a pirate online cinema, earning about $ 200,000 per year. This is how almost all the new movies released in Europe, America and Asia are leaked to the web.

This fast, hi-tech and cross-border criminal business is very profitable. The income of Russian-speaking pirated web resources, according to Group-IB expert evaluations, doubled over the past year: in the end of 2016 it reached almost $ 70 million compared to $ 32 million in 2015.

There are a number of reasons for this. In Russia, sales of smartphones are still growing along with the availability of cheap mobile Internet. Following consumers’ tastes, criminals have shifted their focus from torrent forums to online platforms to allow for this.
Traffic on pirate websites is constantly growing along with their revenue. They draw income from advertising banners, sell subscriptions to their users and are willing to accept voluntary donations. Their shadow revenues are also increasing. To put it into perspective: the average pirated online cinema has an annual income equal to $ 160,000, and the average revenue of a pirated torrent tracker resource is $ 62,000.

New movies may be leaked even before the premiere. In August hackers stole 1.5 terabytes of HBO’s corporate information, including unreleased episodes of various shows, at least one Game of Thrones script and personal information of the cast. They also threatened to release more material, demanding millions of dollars in ransom payments from the company. A little earlier, hackers attacked the Walt Disney Company and stole a copy of the latest installment of “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise which was scheduled to be released on May 26. They threatened to leak it to the web unless they were given a ransom. Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said Disney is refusing to pay the ransom.

The pirate industry is starting to compete directly with legal online cinemas and the only way to defeat it is to destroy its financial infrastructure, strengthen penal sanctions and therefore make piracy too dangerous for the money that can be earned. To prevent leaks, the correct network infrastructure needs to be in place and experienced specialists from Group-IB need to be engaged in