Industry Insights: Building resilience into broadcast cybersecurity

How can proactive monitoring and incident response plans minimize downtime in the event of a breach?

Jamie Horner, SVP, corporate strategy, Providius: Proactive monitoring gives operators early warning when device behavior, traffic patterns, or configurations deviate from expected norms, long before a breach causes service impact. In broadcast environments, this visibility is essential because incidents spread quickly across flat, timing-sensitive networks. A well-defined incident response plan that incorporates real-time operational telemetry allows teams to isolate issues immediately and maintain on-air continuity.

Max Eisendrath, CEO and founder, Redflag AI: Real-time monitoring and defined response playbooks are key to minimizing downtime during a breach. Redflag’s watermark telemetry and automated takedown system pinpoint compromised feeds within seconds and trigger containment protocols automatically. Our machine-learning-based improvements in high volume crawling are critical for this level of coverage.

Crystal Pham, VP, operations and program management, TPN: Proactive monitoring enables early detection of suspicious activity, allowing organizations to contain threats before they escalate. Well-defined incident response plans ensure teams act quickly and efficiently, minimizing confusion and reducing recovery time. This along with business continuity and disaster recovery plans help limit the impact of breaches, preserve business continuity, and minimize downtime.

Damien Sterkers, VP, products and solutions marketing, Broadpeak: Live events have historically required continuous human supervision. This is often overlooked during the transition from traditional broadcast to streaming, as streaming originated with video-on-demand where service quality expectations are lower. While monitoring tools have advanced significantly through the enablement of faster data aggregation, deeper analysis and AI-based pattern recognition, these tools in itself are not sufficient. In critical moments, the most effective way to minimize issues involving piracy or malicious attacks remains relying on skilled personnel who are trained to react, inform and take immediate initiative.

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Jan Helgesen, head of product and solutions, Nevion: Proactive monitoring platforms can inform operators of suspicious activity as soon as it is detected, enabling near-instantaneous investigation and response. Systems can automatically notify stakeholders via SMS or email, even outside of staffed hours, ensuring that critical issues are addressed without delay. Easy access to system health and state enables teams to quickly comprehend the circumstances surrounding an event, reducing the time needed to identify and resolve the root cause.

What steps can broadcasters take to safeguard media assets and intellectual property from ransomware or data theft?

Max Eisendrath, CEO and founder, Redflag AI: Encryption and backups are essential, but traceability is the ultimate safeguard. Forensic watermarks make it possible to attribute leaks and theft back to specific sessions, deterring ransomware and insider abuse.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: Beyond perimeter defenses, broadcasters need solutions that provide dynamic data protection through automated masking, redaction and quarantining triggered by policy violations or suspicious activity. Establish baselines of normal behavior for users and applications, then use AI to detect anomalous activities that indicate potential exfiltration attempts. The critical question isn’t just detecting threats, it’s preventing unauthorized access before damage occurs, dramatically reducing the window of vulnerability.

Michael Benda, chief security officer, Big Blue Marble: To safeguard media assets and IP from ransomware or data theft, broadcasters first need to identify and classify critical content so they can apply least-privilege access, MFA, secure collaboration platforms and separation of duties for sensitive operations such as playlist changes or live-event control. Robust backup strategies following the 3-2-1 principle, using immutable or write-once backup storage and regularly testing end-to-end restoration of large media libraries and playout environments are equally essential. These measures must be complemented by strengthened endpoint, server and network protection plus incident response plans tailored for 24/7 broadcasting, with clear decision paths, tested failover options and defined communication procedures.

Damien Sterkers, VP, products and solutions marketing, Broadpeak: The first step is to ensure broadcasters have the capabilities to detect malicious acts and measure their level of impact. For video services, these impacts typically include a loss of revenue when potential users turn to competing pirate services, or wasted investments when pirates are abusing the service delivery capacity. The second step is to implement measures that not only prevent such acts but also enable an effective response when they occur.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: The first step is to know exactly where decryption happens and to minimize those points as much as possible, because every unnecessary decode is an invitation. The second is to stop assuming that cloud platforms or general purpose operating systems are patched and locked down simply because they are popular. The broadcasters who avoid ransomware are the ones who maintain direct control over access, keys, and update cycles instead of outsourcing responsibility.

How are encryption and watermarking technologies evolving to protect content in transit and storage?

Max Eisendrath, CEO and founder, Redflag AI: Encryption protects transport, but watermarking protects the content itself. Redflag advances both through imperceptible, resilient watermark layers that persist across transcoding, cropping, and AI re-synthesis. Critically, this is coupled with constant ML-based crawling to find infringements in real-time.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: Solutions now offer AES 256 encryption for data both in transit and at rest without compromising transfer speeds, even for massive broadcast files moving globally. The evolution is towards encryption that’s always-on by default, combined with comprehensive access controls and monitoring that provides visibility without becoming a bottleneck. Protection must extend throughout the content lifecycle, from acquisition through distribution.

Ned Pyle, enterprise storage technical officer, Tuxera: Transport-layer encryption has fundamentally evolved with QUIC. Traditional SMB encryption operates at the application layer and derives keys from user credentials, leaving authentication vulnerable — particularly with legacy NTLM which uses weak HMAC-MD5 cryptography. QUIC’s always-on TLS 1.3 encryption creates a certificate-based tunnel using modern cryptography with perfect forward secrecy, encrypting the entire SMB conversation including authentication negotiation. This architectural shift means security isn’t optional or configuration-dependent — it’s built into the transport itself.

Stephan Würmlin Stadler, VP, product, Appear: Encryption has become a foundational safeguard for content both in transit and in storage, especially as more media moves across public and hybrid networks. Broadcasters are increasingly making authentication and encrypted transport mandatory to ensure that media streams and control signals remain protected as they move across multiple trust boundaries. At the same time, content protection is shifting toward integrated frameworks in which encrypted flows, authenticated routing and boundary enforcement work together seamlessly.

Jan Helgesen, head of product and solutions, Nevion: Modern broadcast and media systems now require content transported over public IP networks, like the internet or in the cloud, to be encrypted using authenticated and robust protocols. Recent improvements in hardware acceleration have enabled encryption to be applied not just during distribution, but also on high-value production content. Watermarking may be used alongside encryption as part of a multi-tiered approach to content security.

How can security audits and penetration testing help identify and mitigate hidden risks in broadcast infrastructure?

Max Eisendrath, CEO and founder, Redflag AI: Regular security assessments uncover misconfigurations and overlooked CDN endpoints. Extending these tests to include watermark verification ensures content integrity remains intact from playout to OTT distribution.

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Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, M&E, games and sports, Amazon Web Services: While both of these are good starting points for examining a broadcast system, neither is enough to mitigate risks. Modern security at scale demands continuous monitoring and automatic action, enabled by the cloud. On the AWS cloud, it’s possible to detect changes to the system or new threats as they occur.

Crystal Pham, VP, operations and program management, TPN: Security assessment programs such as TPN and penetration testing identify hidden vulnerabilities and weak points in systems, workflows, and devices before attackers can exploit them. Security assessments help organizations identify potential threats and prioritize the mitigation and remediation efforts according to their specific risk profiles. Regular assessments and testing are critical to ensure compliance, strengthen security, and maintain operations.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: Regular audits reveal the gaps between policy and practice, particularly in hybrid environments where security configurations may drift. However, continuous monitoring provides the real-time intelligence that point-in-time audits miss. Automated compliance workflows with pre-built templates for GDPR, PCI DSS and industry-specific frameworks transform audit preparation from weeks-long ordeals into streamlined processes, whilst ongoing vulnerability assessments ensure you find database weaknesses before attackers exploit them.

Damien Sterkers, VP, products and solutions marketing, Broadpeak: Audits help ensure delivery systems have the necessary tools and are properly prepared to detect and respond to attacks or piracy attempts. In the specific context of media delivery, especially for high-value content, the ability to analyze threats and react in minutes is critical, as there is little value in blocking access after the event is over. Due to this, having specialized personnel on hand to oversee this process in real-time is highly advisable.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: Audits uncover the quiet failures that never appear on spreadsheets, like a control device that has been running the same vulnerable build for years or a switch that was never configured to block external access. Penetration tests expose how an attacker would actually move through a media chain instead of how engineers believe the system operates. In broadcast, the hidden risks are usually in the corners nobody thinks to inspect.

Jan Helgesen, head of product and solutions, Nevion: Security audits provide a structured evaluation of your infrastructure, examining everything from network configurations and device settings to employee practices and compliance with standards like ISO 27001. Penetration testing simulates real-world attacks, allowing ethical hackers to exploit vulnerabilities as an attacker would. This approach uncovers not only technical flaws but also process gaps and human factors that could be exploited.

What are we missing in the cybersecurity conversation?

Jamie Horner, SVP, corporate strategy, Providius: Most discussions still focus on IT-centric tools and overlook the realities of broadcast and media operations, where proprietary devices, timing-sensitive workflows, and non-standard protocols don’t fit traditional security models. The real gap is the absence of continuous, non-intrusive verification of device integrity and network behavior across operational domains. Until broadcasters recognize that their environments require security models built for operational networks, relying on IT-centric tools or ignoring the gaps will continue to leave them exposed and vulnerable to avoidable risks.

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, M&E, games and sports, Amazon Web Services: Security is often thought of as a blocker — instead we need to use security innovation to empower people. We use security automation to reduce mundane tasks, reduce human error, and scale security best practices. And, we use automated reasoning to detect misconfigurations and prove that our security controls are effective.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: The broadcast industry often treats security and operational efficiency as competing priorities, but modern data-driven approaches enable both simultaneously. Real-time monitoring solutions that track resource utilization and access patterns can simultaneously optimize performance, reduce costs and strengthen security posture. We’re also underestimating the value of comprehensive data visibility — organizations managing sustainability, FinOps and security in isolation are missing the insight that integrated monitoring across these domains provides.

Stephan Würmlin Stadler, VP, product, Appear: As workflows become more distributed and cloud-driven, the real challenge is maintaining trust and integrity across every domain, not just preventing attacks, but ensuring streams are authenticated, authorized and carried only where intended. The industry also needs a stronger emphasis on media-aware security tools. Generic firewalls and enterprise platforms can’t meet broadcast-grade requirements; the conversation needs to shift toward purpose-built systems that protect without compromising quality, resilience or real-time performance.

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Michael Benda, chief security officer, Big Blue Marble: One underexplored area is content integrity and audience trust: while much attention goes to IT systems and data breaches, the greater risk for broadcasters is the manipulation, falsification or delay of on-air content. We also need more focus on security culture in high-pressure production environments — live galleries, OB trucks and newsrooms — and on supply-chain risk across the diverse ecosystem of smaller technology vendors and production partners that broadcasters depend on. Finally, the conversation is still weighted toward prevention rather than operational resilience, so there should be more emphasis on how to stay on air during an incident, operate in degraded mode and recover quickly while safeguarding editorial independence and meeting regulatory and NIS2 obligations.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: While awareness is rightly focused on protecting high value content, the industry often overlooks the infrastructure and control paths that sit around it. Timing systems, routing layers, cloud dependencies, and collaboration tools can all expose a workflow long before the media itself is at risk. The missing conversation is about taking back ownership of these layers through resilient transport and private cloud architectures that broadcasters can actually control and verify.