The most enduring questions in the online piracy debate loosely center on what causes it, who is to blame, who can be held liable for it, and what can be done to address it.
Depending on variables including who asks and who answers, answers to these questions can differ quite wildly and are often subject to change. The one constant is that rightsholders’ answers ultimately carry more weight.
They select targets for direct enforcement and identify third parties in a position to assist, or at least, who could be compelled to do so if necessary.
Having a lasting impact at the top end of the piracy supply chain is notoriously difficult. However, move a short distance downstream, placing continuous pressure on intermediaries can eventually pay off. Many can and should do more to fight piracy, the commentary goes, while the remainder are guilty of not doing enough.
Once content cascades down to the masses, ISPs face potential liability, and consumers are blamed for fueling an illegal market. In fact, anti-piracy challenges at this end of the supply chain are so numerous, one might conclude that problems exist almost nowhere else.
The Silent Crisis Costing Billions
For the past several years, site-blocking measures have attempted to build a barrier between pirate sites/services and pirate consumers. These are usually implemented by local ISPs, and in terms of location, could not be further away from the original pirate source.
The Herculean task of building the equivalent of anti-piracy firewalls around ISPs globally is considered necessary, especially in light of an ongoing “silent crisis” that reportedly costs the content industries billions of dollars.
Late August, cloud technology company Velocix cited an estimate from Parks Associates, which predicted cumulative revenue losses of $113 billion for streaming video providers by the end of 2027.
“What’s often overlooked is that a substantial portion of this pirated content is served using legitimate CDN infrastructure,” Velocix continued. “Some platforms report that up to 30% of their CDN traffic is being consumed by unauthorized users, draining network capacity, degrading service quality, and silently eating into service margins.”
The phenomenon is called ‘CDN Leeching’ and while some describe it as a new threat, for some time consumers have been reporting pirate streams of such great quality, they could even pass for the real deal. There’s a very good reason for that; they come from the same source, and only legality sets them apart.
From the rightsholders’ perspective, the situation could hardly be any worse. After producing or buying content, and building a distribution platform to deliver it to the masses, unauthenticated users escape with pristine content at close to zero cost, from an extremely reliable source, which also picks up the tab for the bandwidth consumed.
The Triple Threat
A report published late 2022 by content security company Viaccess-Orca was one of the first to publicly acknowledge what had been known privately for some time.
“Starting around the tail end of 2020, our experts started noticing a new technique being used for the first time: CDN Leeching. Due to its complexities, it has spread comparatively slowly throughout the pirate community since,” the company reported.
“But, as we start to approach the first in a new cycle of large, global sporting events, we are seeing more and more incidents of it occurring. What’s more, these are increasingly coupled with sophisticated front-end operations that, to all intents and purposes, look like legitimate streaming providers with subscriber offers, discounts, advertising, and more. The trend is concerning.”
These quotes are almost three years old, and they describe a problem that was already at least two years old at the time. In 2023, Viaccess-Orca described CDN Leeching as a ‘Triple Threat’ based on the following;
1) Subscriptions loss: Users choose pirate services instead of legitimate platforms.
2) Increased Expense: Pirates access streams from the CDN, but pay for nothing.
3) Service impacts: Pirates consume resources allocated to legitimate customers.
To a background of sports rightsholders warning of an existential threat, how is CDN Leeching carried out, and more importantly, why is it still possible in 2025?
Piracy-as-a-Service
Reports on why consumers need to stop financing criminal streaming services are as common as commentary explaining why intermediaries, including ISPs, DNS providers, and domain registrars, need to step up and take the piracy problem much more seriously. The lack of open discussion on what is clearly a major contributor to the piracy ecosystem is unusual, to say the least.
Anti-piracy companies promote their products and solutions as one might expect, but it’s beyond clear that as a topic for open discussion, rightsholders prefer to talk about other things. There’s no mention in public-facing anti-piracy campaigns, for example, and even when platforms that rely on CDN Leeching are discussed in public, the focus is the services they offer rather than the source of the content upon which they rely.
Under the umbrella term ‘Piracy-as-a-Service’, these platforms are very cheap or even free to access and are more functional and better looking than their legitimate counterparts. For those interested in making the transition from viewer to pirate site operator, a full platform package makes the switch worryingly easy.
Worryingly Easy vs. Regular Worry
With all content piped in (including via CDN Leeching) and the necessary admin/billing/support panels included, anyone can start their own subscription service and begin selling access to others. Verimatrix suggests the price is around ~$45,000 to get started with the potential to make 90% profit moving forward. Maybe other potential outcomes shouldn’t be immediately ruled out.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that a payment of ~$45,000 to an anonymous internet stranger will not always go according to plan. Even if the transaction did live up to expectations, generating $45,000 to break even in a year requires 375 customers paying $10 each per month from Day One.
According to Verimatrix, the going rate for lifetime access starts at $75, with regular access costing as little as $1 per month. That sounds like 1000 customers and a break even celebration almost four years later. Assuming that the ecosystem makes it that far, of course.
Recent comments by the MPA and ACE suggest this general area is considered a top priority. It certainly sounds serious enough to warrant special attention, not unsurprising either, given that the barrier to entry is so low.
“Your grandma’s dog could be trained to do it,” Maria Malinkowitschas at Verimatrix concludes.
Recent reports from various anti-piracy/cybersecurity companies reveal the basics of CDN Leeching, techniques/methods used, and the reasons why it can be difficult to stop. Details of particularly serious and persistent exploits published elsewhere have been excluded (Full original statements linked under the company names cited at the end of each quote)
[Pirates] typically reverse engineer video applications (e.g., browsers) to understand how to access and extract the CDN content, enabling them to distribute pirated material more efficiently. CDN access serves as an entry point for pirates to obtain copyrighted content. (Irdeto)
Stolen tokens & keys: When authentication tokens or encryption keys are intercepted, they can be reused to access video streams. Open access points: Misconfigured CDN endpoints or caching policies can expose content to anyone who knows where to look. Referrer spoofing: Attackers disguise requests to appear as if they come from trusted domains. (Velocix)
Device diversity and compatibility challenges: A wide array of devices for accessing video content, with its own specifications, security capabilities and operating systems, presents a significant challenge in terms of ensuring compatibility across the industry for streaming video providers. As users seek seamless access to content on their preferred devices, the pressure to address compatibility issues compounds, sometimes leading to unauthorized means of access when official support is lacking.(Irdeto)
Pirates hijack legitimate CDNs by hotlinking or proxying origin URLs, piggybacking on bandwidth OTTs pay for, while degrading QoS, inflating bills, and muddying audience analytics. What allows this to happen? Static tokens, loose referrer settings, shared keys across events, and weak origin shielding. (ICC)
DRM Exploitation: The media and entertainment industry is currently facing serious challenges with content protection and cybersecurity, the most pressing of which is the exploitation of software-native Digital Rights Management (DRM). This technical vulnerability allows pirates to bypass DRM protections, leading to unauthorized access and distribution of content. This not only undermines revenue streams but also the integrity of content distribution. (Verimatrix)
Feature Exploitation: An example is where operators need to allow consumers to continue watching content across multiple devices that share an IP address. This consumer demand for content portability creates a loophole that pirates can exploit. Unsecure apps without solid code obfuscation expose valuable DRM license files that pirates will hack to extract the keys and then create their own license files for illicit distribution. (Nagra)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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