Goodbye IPTV: Discover a new way to watch and stream football matches for free
Traditional systems for illegally streaming free football matches, via Internet TV (IPTV), are increasingly being monitored and blocked. So hackers are looking for alternative solutions. And they found them in unprotected Jupyter notebooks.
Security firm Aqua has discovered a previously unknown method of hijacking live football streams and broadcasting them without raising suspicion, via pirated IPTV lists or other methods. To do this, they use unprotected Jupyter notebooks, which they use to capture and transmit live football streams.
- What are Jupyter notebooks for football streaming?
This method has surprised sports piracy experts, because it takes advantage of a tool that has nothing to do with illegal football streaming.
Jupyter notebooks are tools used at a scientific level for big data analysis and other highly technical tasks. They are mainly useful for analyzing or generating scientific code from the browser, so they are not well known outside that circle. But they are still tools that execute code, so they can be hacked to capture and hack live football streams.
Aqua researchers discovered that IP addresses from Algeria hacked into unprotected Jupyter notebooks and used them to attack live football and other sports broadcasts on BeIN Sports.
This stream, already unprotected, was retransmitted to its own servers, via ustream.
“First, the attacker updated the Jupyter server and then downloaded the FFmpeg tool via Mediafire,” explains Asaf Morag, Director of Intelligence at Aqua.
“This action alone is not a strong enough indicator for security tools to detect malicious activity. The attacker then ran FFmpeg to capture the live stream of BeIN sports events, and redirected them to his own server.”
This system allows cybercriminals to hack football from IP addresses that are not monitored, thus hiding their activity. It is then re-sent from private servers to users of pirated IPTV lists.
Although the breach itself is not harmful, as no data was stolen or destroyed, it is a serious security incident, as these scientific notebooks are owned by companies that handle clinical data and other sensitive information.
Cybercriminals have been found to be using unauthenticated Jupyter notebooks to stream free football matches via IPTV listings. The blockade on illegal football over IPTV has been closed, but hackers are finding new ways to continue their activity.