AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning (ML) technologies are reshaping how media and entertainment organizations produce, distribute, and monetize content. Automatic video editing tools, personalization algorithms, AI content generation, and recommendation engines are just some examples of how AI is being used to enhance creativity and viewer experience. AI can help media companies customize content, optimize operations, and streamline production processes. At the same time, these systems create new cybersecurity risks and challenges.
Media and entertainment organizations deal with large volumes of digital assets, intellectual property (IP), consumer data, and high-value creative content with economic and cultural value. Cybercriminals, hacktivists, and state-sponsored threat actors have been targeting the industry for data theft, ransomware, credential abuse, content manipulation, and supply chain attacks. As AI systems become embedded within content pipelines and distribution platforms, the cybersecurity risk expands in both scope and complexity.
Let’s look at how AI is changing cybersecurity for the media and entertainment industry, which U.S. regulations impact risk and compliance, how incident response is evolving, the role of cyber insurance, and how Duty of Care Risk Analysis (DoCRA) and reasonable security frameworks help organizations make defensible risk decisions.
How is AI Changing Cybersecurity Risk for the Media and Entertainment Industry?
AI enables both defensive and offensive use cases. On the defensive side, security teams use AI and machine learning (ML) to improve threat detection, automate malware analysis, and enable rapid incident response. AI speeds up the detection of anomalies in network traffic, patterns of malicious behavior, and potential policy violations. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have highlighted the role of AI in modern security operations to help defenders keep pace with threats.
On the offensive side, threat actors use AI to automate reconnaissance, create highly convincing phishing and social engineering campaigns, generate malicious code, and more. Threat actors are using AI tools to generate audio and video deepfakes that impersonate talent, executives, or brand ambassadors. Adversarial inputs can also be used to trick detection systems and make machine learning-based defenses less effective.
Media and entertainment companies often rely on third-party technologies for advertising, content delivery, audience analytics, and identity verification. Every third-party integration represents a potential attack path that can be probed at scale using AI-driven tools. For these reasons, cybersecurity professionals in the media and entertainment industry need to re-evaluate defenses around dynamic, intelligent systems that depend on data and automation.
What are Common Cybersecurity Risks Affecting Media and Entertainment?
Ransomware continues to be a significant, visible threat. Attackers often target media companies because taking production assets offline, disrupting workflows, or blocking access to distribution systems can stop revenue streams quickly. DDoS attacks are also common and can degrade content delivery platforms during peak events or live broadcasts, resulting in customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss.
Credential stuffing and account takeovers are frequent in subscription-based streaming services as attackers use leaked credentials from other breaches to gain unauthorized access. API abuse and credential theft are also sources of fraud and content management system access abuse.
Data theft and exfiltration are other major risks. Media organizations have personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and proprietary creative assets that have value on the dark web. Unauthorized access to IP can also weaken competitive positioning and monetization efforts. Deepfake clips or AI-manipulated content can be used to defame talent, spread disinformation, or otherwise mislead audiences.
AI-specific risks include data poisoning, model theft, and manipulation of recommendation engines. If a training dataset can be polluted or an ML (machine learning) model can be coerced into changing behavior, content recommendations could be subverted to deprioritize competitors, change what gets viewed, or leverage trust in curated feeds to spread disinformation.
What Security Measures do Media and Entertainment Professionals Need to Consider?
Identity and access management (IAM) is foundational. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), strong password policies, and privileged access controls help prevent unauthorized access to critical systems. Organizations should monitor credential abuse and implement adaptive access controls based on anomalous behavior.
Network segmentation and least privilege access reduce blast radius if an incident occurs. Content creation, testing, production, and distribution systems should be segmented to ensure a compromise in one area does not immediately cascade to others.
AI-specific tools that can help include real-time monitoring and detection tools that can quickly identify threats. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems with integrated analytics help correlate events across complex systems. Patching systems and third-party components to remediate vulnerabilities is also a standard defense.
Training and awareness are critical, especially as AI is used to power social engineering and phishing attacks. Employees in content production, marketing, and executive leadership teams need to be trained to recognize suspicious requests and verify abnormal communications.
Securing AI systems is also important. Validating training data, monitoring for model drift, testing adversarial use cases, and isolating production ML environments from less secure data sources are all best practices.
U.S. Regulations That Impact Cyber Risk in Media and Entertainment
In the United States, there is no single media-specific cybersecurity law. Still, several regulations and guidance documents impact how media and entertainment organizations manage risk and compliance.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act. The FTC enforces consumer protection laws that prohibit unfair or deceptive practices related to security and privacy. Misleading claims about content safety, AI capabilities, or privacy protections could also result in enforcement action from the FTC.
State Data Privacy Laws. State laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) put obligations on organizations to secure consumer data, respond to data requests, and provide breach notifications. These impact how media and entertainment companies handle subscriber data and AI-generated user profiles.
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Media and entertainment companies that target children under 13 or knowingly collect data on children must follow COPPA’s parental consent, data minimization, and security requirements.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). DMCA is primarily a copyright law, but safe harbors require reasonable security practices that may overlap with cybersecurity when platforms receive malware, spoofed content, or experience unauthorized access attempts.
Cyber Incident Reporting Laws. Proposed federal legislation under the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) will soon require media and entertainment companies to report significant cyber incidents and ransom payments to CISA. The timing and severity thresholds should provide reasonable visibility into attacks that impact media infrastructure.
Industry Standards and Guidance. Media and entertainment companies often use industry standards such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to help guide risk assessments, controls, and incident response planning. AI-specific risk management guidance from NIST is also increasingly relevant for securing automation and ML-based systems.
Evolving Incident Response Expectations
Incident response in the media and entertainment sector needs to account for both technical and reputational impact. A cyber incident can result in lost revenue from disrupted production schedules, advertising deals, distribution pipelines, and talent contracts.
Incident response planning should include key stakeholders across IT, legal, communications, and executive teams. This alignment should occur early in the response planning so technical remediation can be done in coordination with public relations.
Response playbooks should include both technical contingencies for AI-specific threats (such as model corruption, automated content manipulation, and data integrity problems) and interdependencies with content delivery networks, cloud providers, and third-party service partners.
Isolating compromised systems and preserving evidence for forensics analysis is also critical. Response teams should coordinate with internal groups and external providers to determine how to block access to impacted systems without impacting availability for legitimate users.
Regular tabletop exercises with diverse scenarios can also help rehearse the non-standard incidents that impact media and entertainment, such as ransomware, supply chain compromise, deepfake misuse, and live event disruption. These exercises improve muscle memory and find gaps in coordination between security, operations, and executive leadership.
The Role of Cyber Insurance in the Media and Entertainment Sector
Cyber insurance policies can help media and entertainment companies manage some of the financial fallout from breaches, ransom demands, business interruption, and liability. Many insurance providers are starting to ask questions and require proof of more mature security practices for underwriting, including incident response plans, identity and access management (IAM), continuous monitoring, and segmentation.
Failing to present evidence of a risk-based security program can result in higher premiums and more limited coverage. AI-specific risks, such as threats to data and model integrity, may also be part of underwriting questions as insurers look to see how organizations harden AI pipelines and monitor model use.
Duty of Care and Reasonable Security with DoCRA
Duty of care is an obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect people from foreseeable harm. Reasonable security is a framework for implementing proportional and defensible controls based on likelihood and impact in the context of the risk landscape and organization.
Duty of Care Risk Analysis (DoCRA) is a structured methodology for helping security leaders evaluate whether specific security controls are necessary, given the threat landscape, affected assets, and operational context. Rather than applying generic compliance checklists and off-the-shelf standards, DoCRA can help security and IT professionals document why controls were chosen, what risks remain, and how those decisions align with business priorities.
Use Case Scenarios for DoCRA and Reasonable Security for Media and Entertainment
Streaming Platform Content Delivery
A global streaming service wants to justify using AI-enhanced anomaly detection for its content delivery networks. DoCRA shows that while network monitoring is sufficient for basic traffic, risks from AI-powered abuse at scale and distributed attacks during high-traffic events justify investment in advanced detection models to automate threat hunting for abnormal distribution behavior during events like sports finals, live-streamed concerts, or seasonal spikes.
Studio Intellectual Property Protection
A movie studio classifies pre-release digital assets and shooting scripts as high risk due to the high economic impact if they are leaked. DoCRA supports spending on data integrity, encryption, and access controls for specific repositories while accepting and documenting acceptable residual risk for lower-impact promotional materials.
Ticketing and Subscription Fraud
A media company has high abuse rates with credential stuffing against its ticketing portal. Using DoCRA, they can justify adaptive authentication and automated abuse detection while maintaining a simpler access path for low-risk user flows. Documenting DoCRA-based decisions on reasonable security makes it clear to senior leadership how tradeoffs were made.
Why a Risk-Based Approach Matters as Media Modernizes
Media and entertainment ecosystems are rapidly adopting AI, cloud services, and fast-moving digital distribution. Attack surfaces are expanding while threat vectors evolve. Cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought when integrating advanced AI and automation into sensitive systems.
A risk-based, duty-of-care approach allows for greater agility in cybersecurity while still meeting regulatory obligations, protecting revenue, and maintaining brand reputation. By aligning cybersecurity investments with business goals and documenting decisions through DoCRA, media and entertainment companies can meaningfully reduce exposure, demonstrate reasonable security, and become more resilient against both traditional and AI-enabled threats.
To successfully approach managing risk in the age of AI, the media and entertainment industry should incorporate reasonable security into its risk strategy.
Establish reasonable security through duty of care.
With HALOCK, organizations can establish a legally defensible security and risk program through Duty of Care Risk Analysis (DoCRA). This balanced approach provides a methodology to achieve reasonable security as the regulations require.
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References and Sources
- U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on AI and cybersecurity https://www.cisa.gov/topics/artificial-intelligence
- National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidance on privacy and security https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
- Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) guidance. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) summary https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
- Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) proposed rules. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/04/2024-06526/cyber-incident-reporting-for-critical-infrastructure-act-circia-reporting-requirements
- FBI Internet Crime Report (cyber threat trends) https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2024_IC3Report.pdf
