In Russia, the income of online piracy market participants decreased by 4.2%, reaching $36.4 million. Analysts attribute this data to the successful blocking of pirate sites, the removal of links from search results, and a decrease in traffic to such resources. However, the number of pirate domains increased by 37.5% over the year.
Despite active efforts by copyright holders, pirate online cinemas are still popular. Their owners are finding new ways to attract viewers and bypass blocking.
Analysts have calculated that the income of illegal distributors of video content has been declining for six years. After a record year for them in 2018, when they earned $87 million, by the end of 2024, the market volume had decreased almost two and a half times — to $36 million. However, the rate of decline in the income of malicious actors has slowed down: from 16% in 2023 to 4% in 2024 — this is the lowest figure in the last six years.
Pirate revenues last year decreased in proportion to the decrease in user interest in illegal content. Search traffic to pirate portals decreased by almost 4%. At the same time, viewers are increasingly attracted to legal online cinemas: the number of search queries related to them increased by 25% in 2024.
As experts noted, the owners of illegal sites actively use technical tools to complicate the process of blocking them. In 2024, copyright infringers chose hosting providers that were loyal to pirate content. In other cases, they restricted access to content, for example, only from mobile devices or only in a specific region, so that hosting providers could not detect violations and block the site. They also created copies of pirate sites.
Pirates strive to attract viewers with a variety of content, including through the distribution of "sanctioned" foreign films and TV series that legal Russian streaming platforms cannot show due to the lack of licenses from copyright holders.
Countering online piracy is reaching a new level. The processes of monitoring and blocking pirate sites and their mirrors, removing links to them from search results are being improved.
He emphasized that the number of users of legal online cinemas is steadily growing. At the same time, the pirate business is becoming less profitable every year. However, copyright infringers do not intend to give up their occupation, and interest in illegal content remains high.
Since the beginning of 2024, specialists from F.A.C.C.T., a Russian developer of cybersecurity technologies, have discovered more than a thousand phishing emails of malicious software. These attacks targeted enterprises, government agencies, and banks in Russia and Belarus. Analysts from the Threat Intelligence department identified these attacks as the activity of the TA558 group.
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