Essential Components For An Effective Digital Risk Protection (DRP) Program

Modern organizations are turning to Digital Risk Protection (DRP) programs to protect their public attack surface from emerging threats, and for good reason. There are several options for security teams to ponder when it comes to selecting a DRP vendor. In order to ensure that your DRP program is an effective threat detector, analyzer and remediator for your business, you should look for a solution that includes these three components:

Selecting a DRP vendor that can provide these three criteria will ensure your organization’s public attack surface remains defended against impersonators and emerging threats. Essential components to an effective DRP program should include:

1. Artificial Intelligence-Based Tools for Advanced Analysis

Enlightened organizations have a massive public attack surface, created from interacting with or using platforms such as websites, mobile app stores, Facebook, GitHub, YouTube, Reddit, Slack and Twitter. The usage of these platforms generates a lot of data for a DRP program to analyze. Facebook alone generates over 4 petabytes of data per day (source: Facebook Research). So, how are you supposed to trust a solution to comb through a sea of new content in order to find credible threats to your organization? The answer is simple: artificial intelligence.

Using predetermined rules and policies, artificial intelligence (AI) technology swiftly identifies threatening content by searching through millions of posts, images, and information available on public platforms -- no matter how obfuscated the threat is. No manual effort can match the power, speed and capability that an artificial intelligence-driven engine can provide. Without AI to support your DRP program, your organization and your community can be exposed to targeted cyber attacks, data loss, phishing scams, compliance violations and account takeovers.

Below are a few examples of specific artificial intelligence technologies and their application to DRP.

2. Global Threat Intelligence and Research

Credible threats are no longer limited to broad-based, one-off phishing attempts or impersonation scams. Often, they’re organized, socially-engineered targeted attacks that victimize specific people, organizations or industries. Finding a DRP solution that offers unique social and digital threat intelligence as part of the package, or as an additional service should be a priority. 

At ZeroFox, we refer to our threat researchers as the Alpha Team. There is an Alpha Team link directly in the ZeroFox platform, where customers access advisories, breaking news, vulnerability info and more.  The Alpha Team leads investigations into threats surfacing on the deep and dark web and identifies trends in threat activity before they impact our customers. Understanding the breadth of an attack or identifying a possible threat before it impacts your business is key to being proactive, rather than reactive, to malicious activity targeting your organization. 

Below is a table of effective threat intelligence requirements for digital risk protection.

3. Automation and Ease of Management

Keeping on top of your organization's digital security is a time consuming, yet critical task. Your DRP program should offer peace of mind that your organization, customers and followers are protected — and not cause additional stress over the amount of time and effort it takes to manage. 

Look for these components in a potential DRP solution to ensure your security team isn’t bogged down with intensive management efforts:

• At-a-glance dashboard statistics
• Cloud and mobile app functionality
• Automated remediation
• Managed services support

At-a-glance dashboard statistics are key for busy security teams. Users can rely on the top-level statistics, like alert volume, escalated alerts, threat analysis statistics and new threat research to name a few. Security practitioners can glance at their stats every time they visit their DRP platform to have better insight to what’s happening on their organization's public attack surface. 

Malicious actors can strike at any time. That’s why it’s important to have cloud and mobile app functionality in your DRP program. Identify and respond to valid alerts the moment they strike with access to your DRP solution anytime, anywhere.

Automated remediation ensures that validated threats are managed the instant they are identified on your public attack surface. Automated remediation allows security teams to identify and prevent malicious actors from deceiving thousands of your dedicated followers.

Managed services support allows busy security teams to stay on top of digital risk protection with the help of platform experts. Having a managed services team on hand supplement’s your security team’s efforts and ensures that your DRP program is operating 24x7 and at the highest functionality.

What’s Next? 

Evaluating your DRP options doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process. For help on finding the right DRP program for your organization download our whitepaper, “A Buyer’s Guide to Digital Risk Protection.” 

Have questions about digital risk protection? Contact us here.