The MPA and the strongly affiliated Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment are the sworn enemies of illegal streaming sites, IPTV services and torrent portals.
Still, when it all comes down to it, the hunter and the hunted finally find themselves on the same digital battlefield, equipped with very similar tools, backed by mostly the same technical rules. Tradition seems to allow pirates to break and make up rules as they go, while Hollywood is free to tweak the law to pick up the slack.
There is no one-size-fits-all scenario in anti-piracy wars, but in general, pirates need your services to remain visible at all times while keeping themselves invisible. The challenge for MPA/ACE researchers is almost exactly the opposite. Find a chink in the armor, get information, and then exploit all possible resources to remove anonymity.
Victory in the endgame, making once-visible sites permanently invisible through a binding legal agreement, is based on meticulous testing. The MPA wants to add two more people to its Global Content Protection team to help collect that from the Internet.
Internet Investigator (OSINT)
At a basic level, most Internet users have dabbled in the world of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). A Google search will return information retrieved from the open internet, but that's just one tool out of hundreds available to OSINT researchers, including those working in the anti-hacking niche.
โThe Internet Investigator (OSINT) is primarily responsible for conducting detailed investigations of key players and other global targets involved in copyright infringement, including investigation of individuals and organizations,โ the MPA job listing says. .
The position requires someone with skills in OSINT and attribution methods. Simply put, this means leveraging openly available information to identify an individual and/or group/organization and then being able to link those targets to illegal activity, direct or secondary breaches, for example.
Unsurprisingly, the MPA cites social media research as an area of โโinterest. Many pirate service operators use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to attract customers and service existing ones. On the plus side for researchers, the volume of data that can be extracted from these platforms and their users is extraordinary.
key responsibilities
Gathering information about pirated services and who runs them can be relatively easy, but that's only part of the job. Any specific intelligence collected can also be used more broadly, requiring the candidate to produce "forensically sound, actionable investigative reports."
After intelligence is gained on a target, a decision must be made on how to proceed. Is civil action appropriate or is the behavior more suited to a criminal investigation? The candidate will offer recommendations based on available intelligence.
As pirated services disappear or are removed, new ones tend to appear. The successful candidate will need to proactively search for potential future targets and analyze them, which sounds easy but almost certainly isn't.
The skill here is to identify the growth potential of a new site, based on the factors currently available. An approach that treats all new entrants equally risks misallocating resources to dozens of low-profile threats. That's not to say that MPA/ACE won't happily shoot them down, but priority targets are called that for a reason.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20 and some initially innocuous players will inevitably slip through the gaps. Data sets that indicate disproportionate interest in social media can help reduce that, along with dozensโฆand dozens of other sources.
Research Manager
A second management role will see the successful candidate "assist the Global Content Protection team in shaping, contributing to and executing the team's enforcement strategy."
Other responsibilities include the following:
โ Oversee a team of investigators working on detailed investigations of key players and other global targets involved in copyright infringement, including investigation of individuals, organizations, and technical infrastructures.
โ Assist in the identification of suitable cases for escalated, civil and criminal actions.
โ Collaborate with MPA member firms, industry partners, law enforcement, vendors, attorneys, and various internal departments to work on case resolution.
โ Oversee proactive identification of potential new targets. Monitor, analyze and report on emerging trends and technologies in online piracy
For anyone interested in OSINT and/or hacking, the above sounds like an exciting job. Of course, the MPA will know all about most potential candidates before they're even invited for an interview, thanks in no small part to the trail almost everyone leaves behind.
