Top 5 Things to Look for In a Brand Protection Solution
Your brand is the calling card for your organization. Cybercriminals know this, and they’re looking to make a buck off of your hard work.
Hackers leverage the trust earned by corporate brands by hijacking their domains, spoofing their websites, and impersonating their executives’ accounts. Elon Musk (arguably his own brand) has had his Twitter account faked by countless crypto scammers, and leaders representing any organization with a solid reputation are at risk.
HackRead summarizes that brand protection is "the [method] of securing the brand and everything associated with it, such as sensitive data, intellectual property, logo... to keep the brand value, trust, and credibility intact.” A 2022 study indicated that over half (53%) of consumers purchase based on brand trust and that seven out of ten believed brand trust is more important now than ever.
Investing in a brand protection solution makes you the hunter, not the hunted. It enables you to see when threats emerge, be they on professional platforms, in your inbox, or on your domain. These threats include account takeovers, malicious domains, impersonations, the dark web sale of stolen credentials, and unfortunately much more. A brand protection solution can stop external threats quickly and efficiently, protecting your valuable assets and people.
No cybersecurity strategy is complete in 2023 without a comprehensive brand protection solution for CISOs and information security decision-makers. Here are five things to consider when making your choice.
1. Comprehensive Threat Intelligence and Monitoring Capabilities
Forbes notes, "threats to brands can often slip completely under the radar, with businesses not realizing customers have been duped and that potentially unsafe products are being marketed until it's too late." That’s why organizations need a brand protection solution that provides comprehensive threat intelligence and proactive monitoring. Any lack of visibility is an entryway that a criminal can expose.
As social media threats evolve and AI is used to scrape platforms for incriminating personal information, engaging in real-time monitoring of online platforms, including social media, websites, apps, and marketplaces, becomes crucial. The better your intel, the better your next steps. Without the right information, you won’t know where to turn or how to strike.
2. Advanced Detection and Takedown Capabilities
Cybercriminals use various methods to exploit brands, such as phishing, domain squatting, counterfeiting, and account takeovers. Unfortunately, sometimes employees that fall for these dupes aren’t aware of the deception.
Advanced detection techniques can identify brand abuse and cyber threats promptly, mitigating risk to the organization. The Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report notes that 74% of data breaches involve the human element. People are bound to make mistakes and give up key information that can lead to impersonated profiles and worse. Even without worker cooperation, fraudsters can spin up fake domains and post incriminating falsehoods online.
A brand protection solution that offers efficient takedown capabilities can remove malicious content and fraudulent websites before exponential reputational damage can occur.
3. Automation
The rate of attack is so high that without automating brand protection measures, organizations wouldn’t be able to keep up. With attacks pouring in from all over the world, enterprises require a brand protection platform that offers global coverage, AI-based analysis, and automated content takedowns.
The load is too heavy for manual operations alone, and it's also too slow. If a company cannot respond to threats before they reach the customer, the damage has already been done. Threats, leaks, and spoofs need to be not only detected but remediated before the public catches wind, or customers could lose money in brand impersonations and blame the company itself.
A solution that can decrease the MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) can make all the difference when catching public-facing scams.
4. Integration with Existing Security Infrastructure
A solution is only as good as a team’s ability to use it. Seamless integration with an organization's security infrastructure is another vital facet of a good brand protection solution.
The platform should be able to integrate with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems, threat intelligence platforms, and other security tools the company may have on hand. However, it should do more than add an extra data stream.
Solutions that employ AI can do the heavy lifting of consolidating visibility and streamlining workflows. The result is enhanced cyber threat management, making the overall stack more usable and palatable for SOCs.
5. Actionable Insights and Reporting
This last point is a bookend to the first; The counterbalance to comprehensive threat intelligence is actionable insight. All the information in the world only serves to confuse if it is not broken down into meaningful, actionable parts that make sense.
A meaningful report is not a regurgitation of thousands of data points. Only those data points that matter, to the exclusion of all else. This is accomplished largely through AI-driven data analytics that can separate signal from noise and provide succinct, understandable threat stories. Armed with these types of insights, CISOs, and IT decision-makers can gain a comprehensive understanding of brand risks and trends.
Being able to produce this kind of clear data once is good; Being able to do it on a continuous basis is now becoming necessary. As increased digitization produces overwhelming amounts of data, the premium is on brand protection platforms that can identify the root of the problem and give you just the data you need to be able to fix it.
The Bottom Line
A comprehensive brand protection solution is key for maintaining effective external cybersecurity. As technical security solutions make full-on cyberattacks more difficult, hackers will search for easier, sneakier ways to undermine an organization. Slippery social engineering schemes are where they'll go.
Choosing a brand protection agency begins a relationship that will last as your organization grows, scales, and meets even newer challenges in the threat landscape. CISOs and information security decision-makers must prioritize evaluating brand protection solutions based on criteria that count.
ZeroFox has been in the business for over 20 years and has secured over 4 million assets. We proactively protect brands by removing over 1,200 pieces of reputation-damaging content daily and disrupting over 800,000 compromising actions per week. Our patented ZeroFox SaaS technology processes and protects millions of posts, messages, and accounts daily across the social and digital landscape, spanning LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Twitter, Instagram, Pastebin, YouTube, mobile app stores, the deep & dark web, domains, email and more.
We specialize in “hunting the hunter” and are proud to be the only unified external cybersecurity platform – from protection to response. Let us show you what we can do for your brand.