LOS ANGELES—The Trusted Partner Network (TPN), the global content security initiative of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), has released a major new industry wide survey and report on content security that finds a number of ongoing security risks and provides data showing that `inconsistent day-to-day execution of technical controls is creating systemic and exploitable risk.'
TPN billed the new TPN STAR Report as the first industry study to analyze large-scale security assessment data and track how cyber risks are evolving across the global content supply chain.
The TPN STAR Report data shows that while most organizations have foundational policies in place, inconsistent day-to-day execution of technical controls is creating systemic and exploitable risk. By analyzing validated TPN security assessments alongside incident-driven Security Alerts, the report shows a clear pattern of control failures that closely match real-world attacks.
“Content security today is inseparable from overall cybersecurity,” said Karyn Temple, senior executive vice president and global general counsel for the MPA. “Protecting intellectual property at scale requires the same rigor, operational discipline, and vigilance demanded in other critical, high-risk sectors.”
According to the report, in the first quarter of 2026, TPN issued more Security Alerts than in all of 2025, reflecting a sharp increase in credential-based attacks, misconfigurations, and exploitation of un-remediated vulnerabilities. While TPN provides the platform and standards for assessing security, fixing any issues is the responsibility of the organizations being assessed.
Recent security alerts consistently pointed to the same underlying technical weaknesses. Those include, the report found, compromised credentials, inconsistent multi-factor authentication (MFA), insecure system and cloud configurations, delays in patching and vulnerability remediation.
TPN STAR Report data reinforces this pattern with vulnerability management, cryptography, endpoint hardening, and access management emerging as the weakest-performing controls areas showing:
“The TPN STAR Report highlights a persistent disconnect between perceived security and actual operational performance,” said Terri Davies, president of TPN. “Organizations routinely overestimate that their controls are effective, especially those that require continuous attention, technical rigor, and operational ownership. Recent technological advances only heighten the urgency to address these gaps before they are exploited.”
The report also found that capabilities such as Zero Trust architectures, conditional access, continuous authentication, and automated compliance monitoring are not yet widely used across the entertainment ecosystem. In highly distributed production environments spanning cloud platforms, remote workforces, and a complex ecosystem of third-party vendors, these gaps can greatly increase the impact of a single compromised credential, the study reported.
In response to these findings, the report underscores the need for urgent industry action to ensure continuous monitoring of systems and access, faster remediation of known vulnerabilities, stronger ownership of operational controls, and consistent enforcement of identity and access protections, particularly across third-party environments.
The TPN Star Report also establishes a critical baseline for measuring control performance and tracking industry progress toward more resilient, operationally effective content security.
The report can be downloaded here.
