White Bullet: A Cybersecurity Company Helping to Combat Online Piracy
What Does Your Company Do?
White Bullet is an intellectual property and data analytics company that offers risk analysis and brand safety solutions. We track intellectual property (IP) infringing websites and apps, using AI to assess and score them in real-time. Our global analytics platform includes a dynamic trust index that provides transparency across online IP infringement, protecting and guiding brands and media companies to avoid high-risk publishers and maximize ROI, securing their digital supply chains. It also gives valuable insights to industry and enforcement bodies on IP infringement risk.
How Do You Differentiate from Your Competitors?
Our founders are anti-piracy and IP enforcement lawyers, investigators, and technicians. The very heart of what we do is founded on the legal data and investigative know-how that accurately assesses what makes a platform illegal versus incidentally infringing. Unlike other companies that analyze web page content, we use AI to assess over 400 data points to accurately identify IP infringement in real-time, with the ability to verify infringement. We also apply optical image processing and natural language processing to assess and predictively score as well as to identify billions of ads that fund these platforms. We have created a unique risk index that can be applied much like a dynamic and constantly updated credit score for websites and apps. This helps advertisers and many more parties to understand the risk profile of a web page or app at any given time and provides transparency on misaligned ad placement.
What Are the Common Challenges in the Cybersecurity Space?
Digital piracy is an easy way to make money from illegal and unauthorized distribution of other people’s content. Over 90% of pirate sites have a form of ad revenue (and 96% of illegal streaming sites have premium branded ads). A similar percentage have some form of malware embedded in their pages to attack visitors. Piracy is therefore itself a cybersecurity threat when you consider that over half of millennials regularly use pirate sites and studies show billions of illegal downloads and streams each year. The innocent-sounding notion of getting some content for free is actually putting users at risk, as well as the networks they operate in, damaging brands whose advertising is misplaced on these illegal platforms and funding criminals.
What Are the Biggest Mistakes a Company Can Make Regarding Security?
This question is perhaps less relevant in the context of piracy. However, piracy and IP infringement online does affect companies. Visitors to pirate sites who are accessing content from company networks are putting those networks at risk. Another example includes many academics and research fellows who turn to pirate content hubs to access research papers, academic publications, or literature that is being distributed illegally. The reason they do it is because the content is offered for free. But in reality, there is a cost. The pirates are not charitable, and of course, seek to make money from any means possible. University and company networks are at risk of spying or data theft when parties interact with these pirate platforms. One of the biggest mistakes is simply assuming piracy can be ignored or provides a free alternative to safe legitimate content. Having robust procedures and policies in place to educate teams and staff is critical to avoid attack as this is a soft target and vulnerability.
Provide Your Best Practice Advice/Top Tip for Effective Cybersecurity?
Always get your content from legitimate and safe sources. Don’t assume pirate sites and apps are doing you a favour by giving away content…. they will get you in one way or another. If you are a company, a university, or research institute, filter pirate sites from your Internet access – tools now exist, including White Bullet’s dynamic piracy database. If you are a brand, make sure you know where your ads are being placed and what you are funding: advise your ad brokers to filter piracy. Real-time ad blocking for piracy is available from White Bullet.
What’s Next?
Piracy is evolving. First, pirate apps are on the rise, sometimes available in the large app stores and other times off-market. Second, social media is now a key driver for finding infringing content: links are posted in social media platforms which may be time-sensitive, for example, only active during a live streaming music or sports event. This obviates the need for static sites that continually host links or content and instead favors "burner" URLs or apps that exist for short periods before being deleted. Others are masked, innocent-looking domains loaded with legitimate and innocent content (like recipes or health blogs) that later inject pirate content only at certain times for brief periods, again driving user traffic from social media and content blogs. So, the new frontier in this highly dynamic world is to reduce the traffic from social media and search, by demoting or filtering these temporarily infringing links.
Conclusion
White Bullet is a leading player in the fight against online piracy and IP infringement. By offering real-time risk analysis and brand safety solutions, we are helping to protect brands and media companies from the risks associated with online piracy. Our expertise in anti-piracy and IP enforcement law, investigation, and technology enables us to detect and prevent online piracy, ensuring that our clients can focus on their core business while we take care of the online security threats.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: What is White Bullet’s mission?
A: Our mission is to detect and demonetize online piracy, protecting brands and media companies from the risks associated with online piracy.
Q: What does White Bullet do?
A: We track intellectual property (IP) infringing websites and apps, using AI to assess and score them in real-time. Our global analytics platform includes a dynamic trust index that provides transparency across online IP infringement, protecting and guiding brands and media companies to avoid high-risk publishers and maximize ROI, securing their digital supply chains.
Q: How does White Bullet differentiate from its competitors?
A: Our founders are anti-piracy and IP enforcement lawyers, investigators, and technicians. The very heart of what we do is founded on the legal data and investigative know-how that accurately assesses what makes a platform illegal versus incidentally infringing.
