Infographic – State of Piracy Security Report

Arxan and iThreat Cyber Group have published The Application Security report detailing how the illegal reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material (piracy) on the web is growing rapidly. Over 1000 sites have been analyzed over the past 3.5 years are part of the dark web which is not indexed by standard search engines. 50 are in the business of distributing pirated releases.

The report by Arxan and iThreat Cyber Group (ICG) breaks down the types of piracy into sections. Software Piracy, Online Gaming Piracy and Digital Media Piracy.

Android tops the list in software piracy with a massive 41% of 30,000 software titles and over 9,000 (17%) software key generators found which generate the product licensing keys to enable unauthorized access to software or digital media. In 2014 software based game piracy there were 23,000 pirated game releases with an estimated figure of over 31,000 for 2015 means that online game piracy has doubled since 2012.

Digital media is being widely pirated. In 2013 and 2014 an average of 1 Million pirated assets were discovered with an estimate of 1.3M for 2015 if the rate of piracy remains the same. TV (24%) and adult content (23%) make up the majority for digital media piracy.

Conclusion

Well despite piracy being illegal it is still on the rise in a growing profitable area for those that distribute it and of course it’s also the biggest distributer of malware for those of you that are security conscious.

Despite companies investing money to prevent piracy it’s going to be a continual problem as there are teams out there who reverse engineer or crack software for the pure pleasure and they always seem to be one step ahead. It’s obviously a blow to lose revenue of this kind and possibly make the users that do legitimately use the software pay more in the long run. Obviously the smaller companies or app developers don’t have the budget to invest huge quantities of money in protecting their software can make subtle changes to prevent piracy and protect their applications. You will find more in the report which is pretty damming and an interesting read.