Hollywood under reel attack

By CAHAL MILMO AND ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - Hollywood itself could not have dreamed up a better scenario: the infiltration of a multibillion-dollar global enterprise by hackers hellbent on stealing the industry's most prized possessions.

Each night, the cyber-crackers and their spies penetrate the computer systems of several sprawling conglomerates to download the newest and most sensitive material, making a mockery of expensive security systems.

In a matter of hours, the products which keep the companies in business by being sold at premium prices to millions are being offered on the internet for free. Only one man can stop it - and he's British.

The only problem for the movie moguls in Los Angeles is that this scenario - give or take a little hyperbole - is based on real life, and the business under attack is Hollywood itself.

As digital technology makes its mark on every aspect of the film industry, it becomes easier for ordinary computer users to reach into cyberspace and grab whatever goodies take their fancy.

Want to see the new Steven Spielberg thriller starring Tom Cruise? Or a rough cut of Ocean's Eleven, which stars George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon in a much-anticipated Steven Soderbergh remake of an old Rat Pack movie?

It's all available through the internet, and finding it requires no more than a few simple steps that can be taught by word of mouth.

There are also scripts, memos to and from agents and managers, email traffic between studio heads, actors, producers, directors and sensitive legal documents.

Anything, in fact, that is stored on a computer at any time and that is vulnerable to infiltration either through insiders taking the material home or - more rarely - by outside hackers taking advantage of inadequate security systems.

Yesterday, the film industry was in uproar following an expose outlining the problem in Variety, the top entertainment trade paper.

Executives and film-makers who had no idea how much of their work was being filched in this way were burning up the phone wires to internet security experts. Websites described by Variety as places where some of the pirated material could be accessed became so overloaded that they crashed.

"Hollywood is experiencing the revelation that everything it saves on a computer is available to prying eyes at any time," Variety reported. "Nothing is safe. Everything is vulnerable. Paranoia is running rampant. Any film for sale on DVD is available on the web."

The main source for the article was James Sinclair, a 21-year-old computer security expert from London who has set up a company called Global Network Security Services to address this problem.

He knows how badly the studios are leaking as he has found a lot of the material himself, and is now working with the likes of Warner Bros and MGM to fix the problem.

As he says - by way of illustration, not as a business proposition - "Give me $US10,000 [$23,800] and I can get you any movie being made in the next 12 months."

The problem, Sinclair explains, is that more and more work in the film industry is being done by computer. For the moment it is mostly confined to transferring data, although digital production is increasingly common too.

Directors and executives will now watch digital downloads of their daily production footage rather than wait for it to come back fully processed from the photographic lab. Similar computer transfers go on every day with sound mixes, musical scores, special effects and rough-cut edits.

Security systems, meanwhile, have not kept pace: the larger companies tend not to understand the need to update whatever they have in place, while small companies often imagine they are too insignificant to be attacked.

"These companies all have these gaping holes," Sinclair said. "The fact is that unless you've secured everything along the way, you're never going to be able to control the industry. You're going to have another Napster, all over again."

Actually it is likely to be worse than Napster, the music-swapping service that was neutered in the courts earlier this year. Napster was at least based on a central server that could be closed down once the courts so ruled; the websites dealing in pirated films tend to have a network structure - the only way to stop them would be to shut down every individual user.

The damage being done is hard to quantify. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the losses are around $US2.5 billion a year, compared with more than $US4 billion in the music business, which has grappled with piracy for far longer.

The answer, he believes, is an industry-wide standard that would ensure that anyone who made unauthorised downloads would leave their digital fingerprints and so could be caught and punished.

"People don't realise that what is safe today might be only 65 per cent safe tomorrow as new software is developed."

- INDEPENDENT