Exploring Ecosystem of Free Illegal Live Streaming Services and Its Price on Legitimate Services

Abstract

In recent years’ online content viewing has substantially increased and marked as entertainment lifeline. There is a tremendous increase in number of viewers watching online streaming services along with traditional linear TV broadcast (Satellite / Cable / Terrestrial) services. As there is a surge in viewership, this demand has invited many free illegal live streaming services to capitalize on original copyrighted content. Monetization through these free illegal live streaming services is made by coupling the content with unnecessary advertisements, malicious programs like user tracking etc. Illegal live streaming services increases during high value event like sports (cricket, soccer, tennis, etc.) where the demand for viewing will be high. This paper highlights on two categories, first, exploring the internals of the ecosystem that has been used for streaming live illegal services. This is visualized by referring to various illegal streaming websites particularly sports. Second, exploring and justifying evidence of user tracking elements via methods like fingerprinting, cookies, third party HTTP request embedded within illegal streaming websites. Further illegal live streaming and legitimate streaming services are compared to quantify the evidence on the depth of user tracking techniques adopted by illegal live streaming services. Aggregator websites that provide space to host illegal live streaming services fail to identify sites that targets on user tracking apart from content streaming. Despite recent advancements in browser extensions in detecting intrusions, malicious software and blocking unnecessary ad’s, users of illegal live streaming services are vulnerable to misleading ads, malicious scams followed by user tracking. This paper concludes with methods to gather, extract information from different illegal streaming websites, and visualize the presence of malicious programs in the context of tracking the user.