What is Digital Risk Protection and What to Look for in a DRP Platform

Digital risk protection (DRP) is the way companies cut down on cluttered threats within the public attack surface. That attack surface is huge: It encompasses socxial media sites, professional networking sites, email servers (and all their vectors), the Deep and Dark Web, applications, services, and the supply chain.

To secure against all the threats lurking externally, organizations need to make sure they have the right DRM solution internally.

What is Digital Risk Protection?

Digital risk protection is the set of practices used to secure a company’s sensitive assets against threats that originate beyond the corporate network. It goes by many names: You may have heard it referred to as Digital Risk Protection, Digital Risk Protection Services, Digital Risk Monitoring, or just plain DRP. 

Done right, it enables security teams to disrupt threats to brands, domains, and people across the multiple channels of the public attack surface. 

It does so in these ways:

• Visibility – DRP offers enterprises unveiled visibility into what’s really going on beyond the security perimeter. Solutions like ZeroFox leverage AI-driven software to glean the most data from the public attack surface by scouring the Dark Web, social media platforms, applications, and more. 
• Protection – A solid DRP solution defends organizations against threats like phishing, malicious domains, impersonations, scripting attacks, and data theft. And that’s only the beginning. 
• Disruption – Sometimes, the adversary has already gotten the advantage. In those cases, takedowns (or pulling down spoofed accounts) are necessary, as are other forms of disruption like blocking offensive content, reporting fraudulent apps, and removing malicious domains. This step “takes care of business”. 

DRP differs from traditional solutions in that instead of waiting for threats to breach the network and dealing with them inside, it takes the fight to the bad guys and beats them at their own game.

The benefits of a trustworthy, high-powered DRM solution can be summed up in a sentence: Peace of mind and proactive threat takedowns against a myriad of threats on the public attack surface. That’s a massive mess of headaches avoided.

Types of Digital Risks

DRM protects companies against digital risks on the public attack surface. But what exactly are those? They include:

• Brand | DRM offers brand protection by stopping attackers from abusing brand collateral in fraudulent schemes, whether via email or online. 
• Domain | Sometimes hackers create fake domains that mimic legitimate ones and can fool users. DRM protection secures domains by finding these out and removing them before they can dupe customers. 
• Social Media | As more and more bad actors use social media platforms to impersonate executives and companies, DRM secures across the social media ecosystem by taking down spoofed accounts and removing other damaging material posted online.
• Executives | Executives are top targets for hungry hackers. They can exploit the trust and following of top-level execs, government officials, and celebrities to fool consumers into bitcoin scams, divulging sensitive information, and more. DRM offers executive protection via threat intelligence and proactive account takedowns. 
• Physical and Locational | These are threats to an employee’s well-being (or that of their family) or critical assets at risk of being hit by real-world violence. DRM engages both physical and cyber threat intelligence to defend against these types of threats. 
• Deep and Dark Web | Cyber criminals congregate in underground chatrooms where plans are laid and resources organized for malicious attacks. DRM uses Dark Web Monitoring to detect and squash these events before they start.

These vectors ultimately lead to successful phishing attempts, data breaches, and financial loss – not to mention reputational damage, a loss of trust, and in some cases, physical harm to executives or organizational assets.

What to Look for in a DRP Platform

When choosing a digital risk protection platform, there are several things to prioritize: 

1. Digital Footprint Mapping | Identify where all external assets exist, such as eCommerce stores, social media accounts, web-based software, and job matching sites.
2. AI-Driven Risk Monitoring | To gain a complete picture of risk, employ AI-based techniques like Computer Vision (automated image detection), Natural Language Processing (NLP) (to analyze text), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) (automatically determine the contents of a web page).
3. Human Expert Risk Analysis | Get the best and most experienced experts of the underground economy to fight for you, not against you. ZeroFox is made up of professionals with this very expertise. 
4. Automated Disruption Capabilities | When a threat is spotted, your DRP software needs to be able to take it down – on its own, without using more human resources, and fast. 

How DRP Can Protect Your Business

By establishing a DRP solution, enterprises can proactively engage in the fight against external cyber risk. Attackers will go for the low-hanging fruit. As more and more companies establish a presence online, cybercriminals are aware that the teams that organize social media posts are less often as cybersecurity savvy as those carefully guarding data on the inside, so they strike there first. If they can cash in on the 82% human element ratio that leads to so many data breaches (I.e., by hacking an account or delivering a trojan app to a non-technical department), they may be able to get an inroad into the company the “easy” way. 

Some examples of this include plots of real-world damage to power stations that originated online, celebrity account takeovers, and LinkedIn brand impersonations – both to and on the site. 

Digital risk management must be considered one of the most potent cyber defense measures of the information age. It’s old-school thinking to think all hackers will come right through the front door (like they’ve never done). Where the industry is looking (internal defenses, XDR-driven network monitoring, SOAR, and SIEM tools galore) is the landmine a savvy cybercriminal might rightly avoid. 

Instead, they are looking where they think we are not and hitting hard where it hurts – in the vastly unprotected domain of the public-facing attack surface.

The ZeroFox Advantage

Named a leader in digital risk protection by Forrester, ZeroFox “leads the pack in social media protection and digital risk analytics. Its coverage of social channels and intelligence stands out because of its ability to protect individual social accounts and analyze unique behavioral risk indicators,” per the report. 

The ZeroFox Platform provides enterprises with digital risk protection by leveraging AI-based analytics to find and remediate signs of risk: phishing attempts, credential compromise, data exfiltration, ransomware, brand hijacking, executive threats, location threats, and more. 

As the only unified platform for external cybersecurity, ZeroFox provides best-in-class DRP services. Protect your people, assets, and brand across the scope of your digital enterprise with a single, comprehensive platform. Check out our Digital Risk Protection Buyer’s Guide to discover what ZeroFox can do for you.