Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how people buy tickets, stream movies, and play games—and in 2026, it is also expected to reshape how cybercriminals attack the global entertainment industry.
A new chapter of the Kaspersky Security Bulletin from Kaspersky identifies AI as the common denominator behind the next wave of security threats, affecting everything from ticketing systems and visual effects pipelines to content delivery networks, gaming communities, and regulatory compliance.
The entertainment sector is uniquely vulnerable because AI is no longer limited to back-office automation. It increasingly touches the heart of the business itself: human-centered stories, performances, visuals, and fan interactions.
As AI systems begin to generate, imitate, and distribute creative content at scale, they also create new openings for abuse, fraud, and data leakage.
“As we examined different parts of the industry, it became clear that AI is the thread running through most of the emerging risks,” said Anna Larkina, web content analysis expert at Kaspersky. She noted that while AI helps defenders detect anomalies faster, it also empowers attackers to model markets, probe infrastructure, and generate highly convincing malicious content.
According to Larkina, studios, platforms, and rights holders need to treat AI systems—and the data behind them—as part of their core attack surface, not merely as creative tools.
Kaspersky’s researchers highlight five critical threat areas expected to intensify as AI becomes deeply embedded in entertainment workflows and consumer experiences.
In ticketing, AI is likely to accelerate the arms race between platforms and scalpers. While dynamic pricing will become faster and more granular for legitimate sellers, the same technology gives scalpers powerful tools to identify high-demand events, deploy bots at scale, and manage resale prices across multiple platforms.
Even when artists or organizers enforce fixed ticket prices, AI-driven resellers can effectively recreate dynamic pricing in secondary markets by constantly adjusting prices based on demand signals.
The growing commodification of AI-powered visual effects also raises serious leak risks. As high-end CGI becomes more accessible through cloud-based AI platforms, studios increasingly rely on networks of smaller vendors and freelance creators.
Kaspersky expects attackers to target this extended supply chain, compromising render farms, plug-ins, or boutique post-production houses to quietly siphon off footage, assets, or entire episodes before release—often bypassing the more heavily defended core studio systems.
Content delivery networks are emerging as another high-value target. These networks now host unreleased episodes, game builds, and live streams for major entertainment brands, concentrating premium content within a limited number of providers.
With AI-enhanced reconnaissance, attackers can more efficiently map CDN infrastructure, pinpoint where valuable content resides, and search for weak credentials or configuration errors. A single breach could expose multiple titles simultaneously or enable malicious code to be injected into legitimate streams.
In games and fan communities, generative AI is expected to change abuse patterns significantly. Players and power users are increasingly jailbreaking in-game AI companions or content editors, or using external generative tools to create material that would normally be blocked, such as hyper-violent or sexualized content, and then reintroducing it into games, mods, or fan-made videos.
There is also a growing risk of personal data appearing in supposedly creative outputs if training or fine-tuning datasets are not properly sanitized, leading to the accidental inclusion of real names or other identifying information in dialogue, lyrics, or imagery.
Regulation and compliance will play a larger role as well. Lawmakers and industry groups are moving toward rules that require clearer disclosure of AI-generated media and stricter consent and licensing practices for training on copyrighted material.
|Kaspersky expects this to drive the emergence of new internal roles within entertainment companies, focused specifically on AI governance. These roles would oversee how AI tools are trained and used across production and marketing, and ensure compliance with legal, contractual, and ethical standards—much like COVID compliance officers once did on film sets.
The full set of AI-driven entertainment risk scenarios is detailed in the latest Kaspersky Security Bulletin. To prepare for these challenges, Kaspersky advises entertainment organizations to map where AI is used across ticketing, production, distribution, and fan platforms and include those systems in threat modeling and risk assessments.
The company also urges stronger security and monitoring requirements for VFX and post-production vendors, especially those relying on cloud-based or AI-assisted tools. Reviewing CDN architectures for deeper anomaly detection, and conducting rigorous security and privacy reviews of generative AI used in games, marketing, and fan-facing services, are likewise critical steps as AI becomes both a creative engine and a security liability.