Navigating the Unknowns: Fraud Mitigation for Netflix Live Events
Aditi Gupta, Yue Wang
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 1 · Main
When Netflix began streaming live events in 2023, its Trust and Safety team faced a fraud problem without historical precedent: no baseline traffic patterns, conflicting priorities between user experience and attack prevention, and adversaries who knew exactly when to strike. Aditi Gupta and Yue Wang describe the threat types they encountered — content piracy, account takeover, and DDoS — and the before/during/after operational framework Netflix built to defend live events it had never seen before. ---
AI review
Gupta and Wang describe a real operational challenge — defending live events with no historical baseline — and the CGNAT distribution analysis angle is more interesting than the standard fraud-prevention talk. The framework is solid, the production experience is real, but this is ultimately a Netflix process walkthrough rather than a generalizable technical contribution.