Updated Takedown Submission Tool Accelerates Phishing and Impersonation Threat Resolution

It should come as no surprise: the digital threat landscape is continually expanding and evolving. Cyber criminals perpetually create new tactics to exploit companies of all sizes– by impersonating brands, executives, and high-profile employees, by executing phishing attacks, social engineering campaigns, and more. In fact, ZeroFox internal research and data shows a 164% increase in threats targeting brands quarter-over-quarter and a 30% increase in domain takedown requests our team receives year-over-year. 

And it should also come as no surprise that these attacks can result in significant revenue losses, brand distrust, and disruptions in business operations. According to the FTC, from July 2020 through June 2021, fraudsters impersonating Amazon representatives scammed Americans out of $27 million, and reports of Amazon impersonators increased fivefold over the course of the year– accounting for 35% of all consumer complaints the agency received about business impersonators. 

ZeroFox Takedown Submission Tool

So, what’s the solution? It’s twofold. Security teams must be able to rapidly identify and remove threats to their brands, domains, and executives before they can cause significant damage to their organization’s reputation, revenue, or operations; and, equally as important, they must have real-time visibility throughout the lifecycle of a takedown. 

All-too-often, these teams are held accountable for overseeing and reporting to stakeholders on takedown status, but aren’t provided regular updates or communication throughout the process– causing delayed risk mitigation and trust issues with their takedown provider. 

ZeroFox’s best-in-class Universal Takedown services help security teams achieve both. In select cases, our in-house team of experts can take down malicious online content on your behalf within 30 seconds. 

And with our recently-launched, updated Takedown Submission Tool, we’re accelerating the manual submission for the less than 1% of risky content that our rule engine may miss. Combined with our automated threat collection and alert validation (ZeroFox averages ~23,000 alerts daily and escalates ~5,000), we’re offering our customers the most powerful combination of takedown automation and comprehensive transparency to ensure threats are rapidly disrupted and remediated. 

Key Features

• Streamlined Submission Workflow: Customers can access the Takedown Submission Tool from the ZeroFox Platform, enabling them to easily input offending emails, domains, IP addresses, social media accounts, posts, or brand page URLs, web content URLs, or phone numbers that need to be taken down.

• Bulk Submissions: Customers can now seamlessly submit large volumes of URLs, social media posts, mobile app content, and more for expedited removal in a single request.

• Automatic disruption and takedown: Threats that customers submit are automatically tagged internally for disruption and takedown, meaning the alert is validated and escalated as soon as it’s created.

How it Works

With a simple, multi-step takedown request form, our customers can easily submit their requests in a few clicks. 

Step 1: Select the Target  Customers input the offending email; domain; IP address; social media account, post, or brand page URL; web content URL; or phone number to be taken down with supporting reason(s).	Step 2: Identify the Asset Customers select their asset associated with the takedown request from the dropdown menu.	Step 3: Attach Evidence Customers add a description of the offending content and one or multiple files to the takedown request.

Once evidence has been attached, customers submit the takedown request, and ZeroFox in-house analysts will pursue and take down the offending content on our customers’ behalf. 

Though our new Takedown Submission Tool was designed to offer a more streamlined takedown process and enable our customers to self-report outliers, it is important to note that it is not a replacement for creating alerts. 

ZeroFox’s world-class rule engine still provides more than 99% of alerts in the ZeroFox platform.

Benefits to Customers

• Faster threat resolution with an expedited takedown submission process, bulk upload capabilities, and automatic disruption and takedown tagging of threats 
• Instant Takedown Submissions*- with ZeroFox’s API and proprietary Global Disruption Network of over 50 partners, including Google Cloud (for qualified submissions*)
• Trusted transparency with regular status updates throughout the entire takedown lifecycle, including email notifications and the ability to view accepted or denied vendor responses from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram directly from our Disruption Activity Dashboard 

As technology continues to rapidly advance and AI becomes more sophisticated, so too will attempts to exploit businesses of all sizes. More cyber criminals will have powerful tools to make smarter, more personalized approaches– making the need for fast, efficient takedown capabilities more essential than ever before; but that’s only half the battle. Takedown processes must not only be swift, they must also be clear, concise, and effectively communicated at every stage in order to accelerate remediation before significant damage or disruption can occur.

Resources

Learn more about ZeroFox’s Disruption and Takedown capabilities, click here or download the Adversary Disruption datasheet.