Category: Netflix

“Zero Day,” a gripping political thriller streaming on Netflix, delves into the far-reaching consequences of a devastating cyber attack. Premiering on February 20, 2025, this six-episode series weaves a complex tale of conspiracy, intrigue, and the dangerous intersections of technology and politics. With its high stakes and compelling narrative, it has all the elements necessary to captivate audiences and establish itself as a must-watch thriller.

The series stars the legendary Robert De Niro, portraying a former President of the United States, as he navigates the fallout from a catastrophic digital assault. Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt—known for his work with The New York Times—”Zero Day” explores the devastating impact of cyber warfare, demonstrating how digital attacks can destabilize nations and threaten the lives of ordinary citizens, all driven by political agendas.

Under the direction of Lesli Linka Glatter, the series skillfully balances tension, action, and political commentary. While initially available in English, it is expected that the show will be dubbed into multiple languages for audiences in both developing and developed countries, widening its reach in the near future.

As Netflix has picked up its user base across the world, especially, after it implemented a ban on password sharing policy, in 2022. The customer base has quadrupled in the last two years, says an update released to the media in November 2023.

That said, its important to note that this series is entirely unrelated to the 2003 film Zero Day, which centers around two students planning a school shooting—a movie that ultimately failed to make an impact at the box office. Instead, “Zero Day” offers a fresh perspective on the world of cybercrime and political maneuvering, setting itself apart as a timely and powerful thriller.

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For all those who were accustomed to sharing their Netflix passwords with friends and family, here’s an important update on how the company has taken action against this practice. Netflix released an official statement last Wednesday, indicating that its efforts to curb password sharing have been highly successful, resulting in the addition of approximately 8.8 million new users to its platform.

In other words, the company’s strategy to discourage password sharing has proven to be a significant boost to its revenue this year. Last year, Netflix took a proactive stance against password sharing and informed its user base about its intention to crack down on this practice, as it was significantly impacting its monthly and yearly revenue collections.

Now, the popular video streaming service is reaping the rewards of this approach, having welcomed more than 8 million new customers, representing a substantial 30% increase in its user database. This surge in subscribers can be seen as a summer bonus for the company.

Password sharing has long been a source of concern, as it can lead to various issues. Misuse of account credentials can result in account blocks and user account cancellations. Furthermore, in the wrong hands, these credentials can be used for scams, potentially draining the account holder’s e-wallets or bank accounts.

In a time when companies often struggle to generate revenue, such challenges can have a noticeable impact on the quality of services and content offered to users. Delays in service provision, subpar customer care experiences, and payment delays for content creators are some of the common consequences.

This summer, however, things are expected to be different from a revenue perspective. Netflix has implemented a price increase for its basic subscription in the United States, raising it from $2 to $11.99. Likewise, in the UK, subscription costs will see a £2 increase, bringing the overall cost to £18. This move is likely to contribute to the company’s revenue growth in the coming months.

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To all those who are concerned about Netflix’s decision to ban password sharing in almost 100 countries, here’s a solution that appears to work for now. A new VPN called Meshnet allows multiple users to connect from the same IP address, using a technique known as ‘Tunneling.’

Moving forward, the popular OTT platform will no longer tolerate password sharing as it significantly impacts its revenue. To address this, it will identify users based on their home address. If users fail to log in from the same IP address recognized by Netflix servers, their access will be blocked.

However, the concept of tunneling can resolve this issue, and Meshnet offers a virtual private network that enables users logging in from different IP addresses to impersonate a single home address, thus concealing their network identity from sniffing bots.

Amazingly, this service works not only on Windows devices but also on Mac, iOS, Android, and Google TVs.

Previously, the service was primarily used by gamers, but now it is also being utilized by streaming service viewers, provided they use a NordVPN app to access Meshnet. This allows them to save nearly $8 per month by adding a member outside of their households.

NOTE: In September 2022, the popular online service conducted a market analysis and discovered that over 100 million households were misusing their login credentials by sharing their usernames and passwords with friends and family members. Consequently, Netflix promptly blocked users who accessed the service from a different geographic location. Later, it started warning customers not to share passwords and instead introduced a plan that allows them to share passwords with their loved ones for a small fee.

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From March 2023, that is within 30 days, Netflix, the world-renowned streaming service provider, is all set to enforce a ban on password sharing. As it not only blocks its revenue stream but also creates multiple security issues that hackers can easily exploit, as each account has sensitive details such as email, phone number and payment details.

Therefore, from early next month, Netflix is all set to roll out a new feature that legally allows the current subscribers to share their account passwords with their loved ones. The feature is called “Paid Sharing” that is already in operation in a few of the South American countries. It is nothing but adding of new profiles under one account, so that the same password can be shared with others at an extra cost, sans the fact on whether they belong to the same household.

All these days, one person from a household used to subscribe for the service and share the password and account details with others, say friends or other family members.

And the servers of Netflix used to identify such password sharing instances as Red Flag and used to lock their account, if their IP address and device ID did not match with profile location details of their Netflix accounts, respectively.

Now, they can continue doing the same, provided they pay an extra amount. However, the person who will use the shared credentials should live in the same region, means state or province.

UK users and consumers from America will test this new official paid sharing feature in a few days’ time and let’s hope that it will put an end to the security issued that arises otherwise.

Technically speaking, Netflix is not stopping the password sharing feature, but it is instead monetizing it. So, that its cash registers ring, thus helping the streaming service provider recover its losses to a certain extent.

NOTE- Netflix already imposed a VPN Blocking program since January 2016, thus blocking its users from accessing content from countries where its content is unavailable or not allowed for viewing, like China.

 

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Netflix customers are being warned not to disclose any personally identifiable information on emails and SMS links sent to them by the video streaming firm, as the links and the impersonation is fake and a part of a fraudulent data harvesting campaign.

According to a report published by INKY, a cloud based email security service offering firm hackers launched a phishing scheme impersonating Netflix between August 21 and August 27 and started collecting sensitive details from customers.

The campaign saw a malicious HTML attachment passed as a ZIP file to targets and the social engineering attack was planned so convincingly that it easily convinced the victims to hand over their details.

Prima facie conducted by a forensic firm on request of Netflix discovered the origin of such emails from a Virtual Private Server functioning in Germany and then redirecting the traffic to a Peruvian University.

NOTE 1– Last year, a similar form of attack was planned to dupe the customers of Amazon during the thanksgiving and Christmas season. However, only a few online users fell prey to the campaign and so the loss was minimal.

NOTE 2- In a phishing attack, hackers try to convince the online users with a fabricated web page that impersonates a big company, often a technology or service providing firm. They email or SMS with a subject-line of account blockage and ask the target to immediately click on the link and fill in sensitive details in order to resume the service that has been paused.

 

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Netflix has a new documentary series airing next week — “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies & the Internet” — in which Yours Truly apparently has a decent amount of screen time. The debut episode explores the far-too-common harassment tactic of “swatting” — wherein fake bomb threats or hostage situations are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address.

Image: Netflix.com

The producers of the Netflix show said footage from an interview I sat for in early 2020 on swatting and other threats should appear in the first episode. They didn’t specify what additional topics the series would scrutinize, but Netflix’s teaser for the show suggests it concerns cybercrimes that result in deadly, real-world kinetic attacks.

“Conspiracy. Fraud. Violence. Murder,” reads the Netflix short description for the series. “What starts out virtual can get real all too quickly — and when the web is worldwide, so are the consequences.”

Our family has been victimized by multiple swatting attacks over the past decade. Our first swatting, in March 2013, resulted in Fairfax County, Va. police surrounding our home and forcing me into handcuffs at gunpoint. For an excruciating two minutes, I had multiple police officers pointing rifles, shotguns and pistols directly at me.

More recently, our family was subjected to swatting attacks by a neo-Nazi group that targeted journalists, judges and corporate executives. We’ve been fortunate that none of our swatting events ended in physical harm, and that our assailants have all faced justice.

But these dangerous hoaxes can quickly turn deadly: In March 2019, 26-year-old serial swatter Tyler Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison for making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that resulted in the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident.

In 2021, an 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in was sentenced to five years in prison.

The first season of the new documentary series will be available on Netflix starting June 15. See you on TV!

Netflix, which is struggling to keep its profits margin intact for the past few quarters, has finally banned the password-sharing activity among its users. Earlier, one subscriber used to pay for the premium service and used to share that single password with near and dear.

Now, the streaming behemoth has ended this menace as it is losing revenue and is fed up with the practice of sharing passwords among users.

Usually, as soon as a password is created, the server keeps a tab of the device that is being used by the user. And from then on, the password is being used by the same user. Once the location from which the password is used is locked, then the server recognizes a password login made from a different location as a suspicious login and locks down the account, and informs the user to take action.

With the menace of password sharing, Netflix is constantly witnessing account lock issues as users are sharing their passwords with people in other states and triggering location mismatch, leading to account lockouts.

To end this menace, Netflix has announced a password-sharing ban and will implement it strictly in the next few days.

Netflix is also thinking of introducing an advertising feature as a default to all its premium users to keep its revenue bells ringing.

In the past few months, the company lost about 200,000 users and might even lose another 2 million between April and June.

Elon Musk, the Chief of Tesla, recently disclosed his perspective on Netflix through one of his tweets and said that over 100 million users of the California-based company were watching the streaming service. But in reality, the company was genuinely earning revenue from just 7 million users.

This means, the rest were sharing passwords with a friend and family members and were enjoying all the content for free.

After the tweet from Musk, Netflix received a brutal reaction at the stock exchange as the company lost nearly £40 billion in revenue as the shares went south.

To block unauthorized access to the company’s services, Netflix imposed a password sharing ban on its users from this weekend.

Amazon and Disney Hotstar have already implemented the password ban rule in February this year and now Netflix has also done so.

Note- Netflix which has a global subscriber base of over 221.8 million will soon air some interesting content related to the Duke and the Duchess of Sussex and as a part of a $100m deal it is showing some exclusive content related to the participation of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry as guests at the Invictus Games

 

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