How Global Enterprises Can Build a Scalable Brand Protection Program

Your brand's growing online presence is a priceless asset, expanding your reach, building credibility with customers, and creating opportunities for engagement and sales. However, it's also an increasing area of vulnerability. Today's brands face an array of sophisticated threats across the surface, deep, and dark web. While you may have robust internal security systems in place, 83% of cyberattacks now originate outside traditional security perimeters. Protecting your wider digital footprint requires vigilant monitoring beyond your immediate network boundaries.

From brand impersonations to fake review bombing campaigns, intellectual property theft to social media account takeovers, modern threat actors target external brand assets to deceive customers, steal data, or damage trust in spaces with limited visibility and control. These attacks are often coordinated through hidden channels on platforms like Discord, Telegram, and dark web forums.

The consequences are severe, including financial losses, reputational damage, compromised customer trust, and operational disruption. The volume and complexity of threats continue to escalate as attackers deploy ever more sophisticated techniques with the help of AI.

Global brand protection services are therefore now mission-critical to safeguard revenue, reputation, and customer relationships. Read on to discover how you can proactively monitor these external threats, spot the early warning signs, and launch effective countermeasures.

Why You Need Global Brand Protection Services

The threat of brand impersonation shouldn't be underestimated. This highly effective strategy allows threat actors to obtain direct access to a company's customers and can result in millions of dollars in lost income, theft of personal information, and reputational harm. Research shows that 65% of customers lose trust in a brand after an impersonation attack, and 50% of all cyber attacks today involve some form of brand impersonation. Year-over-year, ZeroFox has seen a 519% increase in security incidents linked to impersonations. 

A component of brand impersonation, domain impersonation, uses techniques like cybersquatting, typosquatting, homoglyphs, or domain spoofing. This typically involves setting up malicious domains and subdomains that mimic legitimate ones, often using branded content, to conduct fraud and scams. Attackers then create convincing replicas of official websites to steal credentials or distribute malware. They often use automated phishing kits with built in evasion techniques designed to avoid detection by automated web scrapers utilized by threat detection tools. 

In addition to becoming more common—ZeroFox has seen a 40% increase in alerts for fraudulent or malicious domains—this type of brand abuse is also growing increasingly sophisticated with the help of AI. These activities can seriously harm brand reputation, revenue, and customer experience. Not only are the attacks more sophisticated, the emergency of AI has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for threat actors. Technical skills, such as English proficiency, are no longer as important to implementing these types of attacks.

Social media fraud has likewise exploded, with impersonation attacks increasing by 100% year-over-year. These involve scammers posing as legitimate companies and setting up fraudulent accounts, running fake ads or holding bogus contests to lure unsuspecting customers on trusted platforms like Facebook or Instagram. 

At the same time, more and more brands are actually losing control of their own authentic channels via phishing, social engineering, or hacking attacks. Such social media account takeovers have surged by 307% in just two years. 

All told, social media cyber crimes like these are proving extremely lucrative for the bad actors behind them, generating $4B in global revenue annually.

A particularly insidious brand threat is posed by rogue mobile apps. These are deceptive applications that mimic legitimate apps from established brands to exploit users by stealing information or compromising security. Among other things, fake apps are responsible for scams, IP and copyright and infringement, cheating, and piracy. Despite app store safeguards, rogue apps can bypass filters, acting as malware and endangering both customer and organizational security. 

Data leakage rounds out these threats, exposing sensitive information that damages reputation and customer trust. The unauthorized exposure of sensitive information such as PII, account credentials, financial records, and trade secrets can occur through various channels, including the deep and dark web, social media, and data broker sites. Such breaches frequently cause substantial monetary, regulatory, and reputational damage.

The Foundation: Key Elements of Global Brand Protection Services

The most effective global brand protection services provide a proactive, multi-layered defense by combining comprehensive asset visibility, continuous monitoring, and rapid response capabilities. Let's explore how to use these tools to combat brand abuse:

Comprehensive Asset Inventory

A typical organization has a broad online presence that includes company websites, social media, apps, review sites, and more, making it hard to keep track of where your own brand shows up. According to industry research, only 17% of organizations can clearly identify and inventory their exposed digital assets. This creates vast blind spots in your security posture and leaves your brand vulnerable to exploitation at multiple touchpoints. 

To understand where your interests might be under threat:

• Start by meticulously cataloging digital assets to document all owned domains, social accounts, and other digital properties where your brand appears. This is a great time to employ an external attack surface management (EASM) solution to discover unknown assets as these are the ones threat actors often use as an entry point to access internal systems.
• Equally important is maintaining comprehensive IP portfolio management records of trademarks, patents, and copyrights across all relevant jurisdictions.
• Partner network mapping provides another valuable layer of visibility, identifying authorized resellers, distributors, and partners who legitimately use your brand assets.

With this inventory complete, you can conduct a meaningful risk assessment to evaluate which assets present the highest value to attackers and prioritize protection accordingly.

Multi-Channel Monitoring Strategy

Effective brand protection requires maintaining continuous visibility into the entire digital landscape. Surface web monitoring serves as the anchor, tracking the marketplaces, platforms, and public-facing sites where your brand appears. 

Social media tracking allows you to identify unauthorized accounts, misuse of brand assets, or negative discussions. This ability has become particularly relevant given the explosion of brand abuse on these platforms.

These safeguards should be complemented by ongoing dark and deep web surveillance to monitor underground forums and marketplaces where credentials and plans are often shared in preparation for attacks.

Continuous domain monitoring rounds out the multi-channel monitoring strategy. This includes watching for the re-emergence of previously removed domains that have minor tweaks. Threat actors often publish these immediately after takedowns in an attempt to try and avoid detection. Plus, continuously monitoring for cases of typosquatting, cybersquatting, and other look-alike domain attacks that target your customers. 

With ZeroFox, you get access to all these capabilities and more. Thanks to its global collection network scanning over 65m domains and URLs and more than 1 billion content sources, ZeroFox delivers unmatched visibility into the threats targeting your brand across the digital ecosystem. This comprehensive multi-channel approach ensures that no threat vector goes undetected, giving your security team the necessary intelligence to act swiftly and decisively, mitigating potential damage.

Building Global Brand Protection Scalability Through Technology

Given the seemingly infinite breadth and depth of the digital world, manual brand protection is an unsustainable prospect for any business. Protecting your organization's integrity requires scalable, technology-driven solutions that can keep pace with the vast array of evolving threats. 

By leveraging advanced AI in combination with professional expertise, organizations can better detect and respond to brand abuse with speed and precision, ensuring comprehensive protection across global markets. Let's explore how cutting-edge technologies empower scalable brand protection strategies.

AI-Powered Detection

At the core of these systems lie machine learning models that can identify the patterns that indicate brand abuse without requiring explicit programming. 

For example, AI can be leveraged to provide more insight into threats by identifying relationships between individual events, or to gauge the scale and scope of an entire attack campaign. This involves finding associations between data points gathered through immense amounts of telemetry. This can range from identifying tactical elements like a single IP address to linking incidents across different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and websites.

Another important tool is computer vision technology. Modern solutions use single shot learning algorithms that can use minimal data to detect logo misuse or counterfeit products in images across the web. This technique is similarly used in the detection of potentially malicious domains that may be copies of legitimate pages with just subtle alterations made to avoid detection.

ZeroFox is also developing AI systems to better detect deep fakes and understand the context that surrounds them. This approach is based on extracting video frames for image analysis, and enables ZeroFox to find clues left behind by AI in the video to determine if it is a deepfake.

Natural language processing capabilities add yet another layer of protection by monitoring for written mentions of brands and assessing their implications for potential threats. Combining image analysis with audio transcribed from videos and looking at the content can further establish risk, such as if a discussion falls outside the limits of your brand's values.

Automated clustering ties all these capabilities together, grouping related infringements to identify major threat actors for more efficient responses.

Automated Response Capabilities

Once threats are detected, prioritization frameworks can focus limited resources on the highest impact threats first. For example, ZeroFox's External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solution prioritizes vulnerabilities based on severity, exposure type, potential impact, and exploitability. And AI-driven recommendations enable rapid mitigation efforts to improve both detection and response times.

Automated remediation can then provide rapid protection using streamlined takedown workflows that slash the time between detection and resolution. 

While some threats have a limited lifespan, others often reemerge immediately after a takedown. For this reason, it's important to have a continuous solution that monitors for threats 24/7 and ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.

This combination of automated detection, prioritization, and response provides the basic scalable infrastructure that every enterprise needs to protect their brands. However, while these technologies might be necessary, on their own they're not sufficient to ensure success. Let's take a look at what's missing.

The Human Element: Expert Analysis and Response

Many cybersecurity competitors rely on various AI technologies to deliver their entire service, meaning an AI analyzes a threat, makes a decision, and then pushes it directly to the customer. However, to achieve this, these companies must limit the scope of the data they analyze, focusing only on content that can be processed automatically to improve reported metrics like false positive rates.

ZeroFox Lead Product Marketing Manager Matthew Levine highlights why this end-to-end AI approach results in a weaker offering.

"Companies relying solely on automation miss plenty of things because the content doesn't fit into their algorithm box," he explains.

"Anything that's difficult or messy, they say: 'Let's just skip it'." 

He contrasts this with ZeroFox's approach of getting as much data as possible to avoid missing anything: "Our main drive is to deliver the highest quality intelligence that we can."

This exceptional level of performance is achieved by complementing AI with human expertise, because, unlike competitors, ZeroFox ensures seasoned professional analysts are proactively involved in delivering insights and prioritizing alerts. 

"If there is any kind of inconsistency even beyond all the checks and balances that we do, there is still a person that will look at it and confirm that this is true and accurate," Matthew points out. 

"It's not just AI making blind decisions in a box, because we make sure to always incorporate the human element." 

Let's take a closer look at how this combination of advanced technology with expert human oversight provides effective brand protection:

Threat Intelligence Integration

Combining automated brand protection with expert threat intelligence creates powerful synergies for global enterprises:

• Early warning systems detect emerging tactics before they become widespread across your industry
• Threat actor attribution helps identify repeat offenders and criminal networks targeting your brand
• Contextual understanding allows security teams to place brand threats within broader attack patterns

Together, these intelligence streams supply strategic insight that helps security leaders make informed decisions about protection priorities and resource allocation.

Implementing Advanced Global Brand Protection Measures

Even if you already have a basic brand protection program in place, you can implement more sophisticated protection measures to further enhance security and resilience against evolving threats. Let's take a look at what this looks like:

Intelligence-Driven Enforcement

Reactive responses after an incident are a poor substitute for proactive brand protection. Here's how you can counter threats at the source:

• Use threat pattern analysis to allow your security teams to identify and anticipate evolving attack methods before they impact your brand.
• With network disruption, an advanced response approach, you can target infrastructure used for multiple attacks rather than addressing individual incidents after the fact.
• Coordinate legal action to build cases against persistent infringers, leveraging evidence collected through your monitoring platform.
• Deterrence strategies complement these efforts, making your brand a less attractive target through visible enforcement actions and quick takedowns of infringing content.

Global Disruption Network

For individual companies, tackling brand abuse with content takedowns or network disruptions can be challenging due to a variety of factors, including:

• Scale: The internet is too vast for any single business to monitor effectively
• Resource constraints: Monitoring and takedown require substantial technical infrastructure, legal expertise, and human resources
• Jurisdiction: Content crosses international borders, requiring multi-jurisdictional authority
• Technical access: Each platform has unique systems, APIs, and reporting mechanisms
• Persistence: When you remove content from one location, it can quickly reappear elsewhere, leading to a game of "whack-a-mole"

Leveraging professional expertise can enhance your takedown capabilities and extend your reach far beyond what's possible alone.

ZeroFox maintains partnerships with over 700 global disruption partners, including hosts, registrars, ISPs, and social media platforms, providing exceptional reach for enforcement actions. 

For example, ZeroFox and VirusTotal have partnered to enhance threat detection by integrating ZeroFox's threat intelligence data with VirusTotal's platform. This collaboration provides the security community with improved visibility into external cyber threats, enabling more effective defense against malicious content. 

Customers gain the ability to verify the existence of malicious URLs and receive additional research on URLs and IPs by reviewing these alerts on the VirusTotal database. Of course, ZeroFox customers have the option to opt out of sharing data with VirusTotal as needed. 

On the threat response side, these platform relationships are indispensable because they give you direct communication channels to major online platforms, allowing you to bypass standard reporting queues and remove content at its source, instead of just blocking individual instances. This expedites the takedown process for infringing content, potentially reducing response time from days to minutes. For even greater efficiency, API integrations can be set up to connect directly with platforms such as Google's Web Risk, allowing enforcement in as little as 15 minutes.

ZeroFox: Comprehensive Global Brand Protection Services

ZeroFox provides global enterprises with the comprehensive brand protection capabilities needed in today's threat landscape. 

Our platform provides AI-powered digital risk protection to detect and respond to threats at scale, safeguarding 40 million+ assets across the surface, deep, and dark web.

Our technology is enriched by the full-spectrum expertise of our 200+ team of threat analysts who deliver actionable insights tailored to your industry and organization. 

ZeroFox's disruption capabilities and extensive Global Disruption Network mean we can rapidly and permanently purge fraudulent content, accounts, and sites wherever they appear.

Book a free demo to find out why global enterprises trust ZeroFox to protect their domains, executives, and brand integrity in an increasingly hostile digital environment.