Brand protection often brings to mind safeguarding Intellectual Property (IP) and trademarks. However, the digital landscape presents evolving risks that demand equal attention. One aspect of digital risk protection – cyber brand protection – is crucial for safeguarding your business’ reputation, your relationship with consumers, and your future financial success. And as we examine current trends, data suggests that these threats continue to increase.
This year, BrandShield found that 98.5% of CISOs say their company suffered a cyber attack. So, in 2025, protecting your brand online is critical. It can mean the difference between your business continuing to grow and thrive or struggling to recover from a reputational hit, which leads to lost sales and decreased investor and customer confidence.
Why CISOs Should Consider Cyber Brand Protection
Cyber brand protection encompasses all aspects of protecting your brand’s online reputation, from preventing bad actors from falsely representing themselves as members of your senior leadership to unauthorized merchants offering your goods or services on websites or online marketplaces.
According to BrandShield’s internal research, CISOs in the retail, software, finance, and other sectors grapple with several challenges directly related to cyber brand protection. Notably, a large amount of financial damage incurred from cyber attacks, with most companies incurring damages in excess of $1 million per scam.
The ever-increasing financial consequences of cyber attacks mean that CISOs are now responsible for far more than securing data - they’re at the frontlines of stopping brand-related digital threats, which pose a serious risk to their organizations.
The fluid nature of attacks adds to the complexity of cyber brand protection. Cybercriminals are constantly sharpening their strategies and trying different methods, changing their tactics once organizations develop defenses against a particular type of attack.
The sheer volume of cyber attacks is also a major factor impacting organizations. 2023 was the worst year on record for data breaches, with a 72% increase in attacks from 2021, and there are no signs of the threat slowing down.
Additionally, traditional online brand protection strategies are unequipped to handle modern threats, such as social media scams, advanced phishing attacks, executive impersonation, and more. This means that many organizations that haven’t updated their cybersecurity strategies may be woefully underprepared for the reality of today’s online threats.
5 Major Challenges CISOs Face for Brand Protection
There are several obstacles facing CISOs looking to strengthen their cyber brand protection.
1. Lack of familiarity with how brand protection and cybersecurity overlap
According to BrandShield research, 32.5% of CISOs say that a lack of familiarity with the intersection of brand protection and cybersecurity is a hurdle to effective brand protection. The absence of real-world knowledge for navigating emerging online threats is often cited as standing in the way of protecting against digital risk.
Cyber threats require both technological solutions and intervention by human experts, who are well-versed in what it takes to stop cyberattacks before they happen and minimize damage in the event of a breach.
2. Impersonation attacks
Famous software firm, Egress, found that impersonation is the most prolific phishing attack strategy in 2024. Our new survey confirmed that executive impersonations are impacting more organizations than ever before, with 28% of the CISOs saying they had encountered this attack style in the last three years.
Impersonation attacks continue to be a problem. BrandShield’s previous 2023 report named impersonation attacks as one of the top three threats organizations are facing, and this risk only continues to grow. Complicating matters, these attacks are becoming even harder to detect due to new technology, such as deepfakes.
3. Increasing AI adoption
The democratization of AI means that this technology is accessible to more people than ever before. But as AI grows more ubiquitous, AI-based online threats are also expanding. GenAI tools, make it far easier to impersonate brands and company executives.
These tools streamline IP infringement, enabling users to generate convincing-sounding content that mirrors a brand’s voice, with just a few prompts. The big challenge with AI now is scalability. It used to take bad actors about a day to create a scam, but due to the availability of AI tools thousands of scams can be created fairly quickly.
Deepfakes take impersonation to a new level, making the threat far more difficult to manage. Scammers have gained unprecedented tools for creating realistic videos that persuade the average employee that they are indeed speaking with an executive. These highly convincing videos mean that more companies are being victimized and are grappling with devastating financial losses. For example, a Hong Kong employee was tricked into paying more than $25M USD of her firm’s money to scammers in a deepfake video conference call.
4. Social media scams
Frauds on social media platforms are especially difficult for brands to mitigate. These sites are particularly vulnerable to cyber crime, as users on these platforms often believe that they are interacting with people they actually know.
Research indicates that phishing attacks are far more successful on social media than other mediums. A Google study found that email phishing is 13.7% effective on average, whereas a later study by Blackhat found a 66% success rate on social media.
The lack of robust security infrastructure on social platforms often emboldens scammers. And thanks to a large number of platforms, cybercriminals can target a greater number of users than ever before.
Deepfakes are regularly spread on social media platforms, with users often reposting them because they believe they are real. Not to mention that social media is also a hotbed for fraudulent marketplace listings, where scammers falsely claim to be selling authentic products from popular brands.
From an organizational perspective, CISOs are often the last to know about potential trouble brewing on social media. Typically, marketing or legal teams own the responsibility for a brand’s social media channels, meaning that IT and Security are left out of the loop.
5. Accelerating incident response time
Many of the CISOs we surveyed said that incident response will be their top priority in the next year. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach hit a record high in 2024 at $4.88 million, with this figure including lost sales and business.
The same report found that for most breached organizations, incident recovery time took more than 100 days. For each day that a business is focused on post-attack clean-up, they’re losing manpower hours and time which could be focused on sales and other revenue-boosting operations.
Reducing the economic impact of cybersecurity incidents or breaches requires an effective incident response strategy. While AI tools have increased the risk of certain types of cyber threats, such as impersonation, AI also provides an opportunity for organizations to improve their incident response times.
5 Brand Protection Strategies for Tackling Current Cyber Challenges
CISOs should consider taking the following steps to sharpen their brand protection strategies and protect their organizations.
1. Implement employee education
Employees are the main target of cyber scammers using various types of phishing attacks, including impersonation attacks. So, educating your teams on how to recognize suspicious messages is key to preventing a breach before it happens.
Teach your employees about the risks of phishing on social media and email. Even learning the basics is enough to significantly reduce the effectiveness of phishing attacks targeting your organization’s employees.
2. Update internal cybersecurity policies to reflect evolving brand-related risks
Because the digital threat landscape is so fluid, it’s important that you regularly review your internal security policies to stay on top of emerging risks. For example, as AI creates new threats, staying updated with the latest solutions to combat emerging threats is essential.
3. Increase internal collaboration to protect social channels and use software if necessary
Your people are a critical resource in battling online threats facing your brand. Implement a clear, company-wide social media policy, in collaboration with your Marketing team, to secure your social media channels.
By leveraging full internal collaboration between Marketing, Legal, Security, and IT teams, your business will be able to battle social media scams far more effectively. Have your Marketing team help with proactively monitoring social channels in a hands-on capacity. This teamwork can also improve incident response times and reduce damages in the event of a breach.
Alternatively, if manually monitoring social channels becomes a time-consuming endeavor, you can partner with digital risk protection provider to make it more efficient.
4. Leverage the right cyber brand protection tools
Cyber brand protection tools can be used to monitor and detect phishing, impersonation, and fake accounts. AI-powered threat intelligence platforms with automated features to identify and mitigate brand abuse are also enormously helpful when managing threats to your company.
Software tools may accelerate incident response time, detect threats faster, and can be used to automatically launch first-response steps to reduce potential breaches by using AI. According to IBM, AI-powered tools for prevention save organizations money. These solutions were found to save organizations an average of $2.2 million in data breach costs.
5. Don’t settle for threat intelligence, also use threat hunters
Working with threat hunters is a valuable investment, and allies outside of your organization can be crucial for safeguarding your brand’s reputation. Because brand infringement is illegal, it’s important to develop relationships with law enforcement to combat cyber criminals who illicitly use your intellectual property. This is something that threat hunters can help with.
Also, threats grow and change quickly, so a vendor partner providing a fully managed service can help CISOs keep pace and partner to remove some of the burden from their shoulders.
Future-Proof Your Brand Protection with the Right Vendor Partner
To tackle major cyber challenges for 2025, choosing a vendor partner that’s up-to-date with industry trends and best practices and able to help guide you through a comprehensive and effective solution is crucial. BrandShield provides an AI-powered platform that empowers you with a complete brand protection solution to help you stay ahead of emerging threats. We offer a fully managed service with 24/7 efficient incident response.
In addition to providing your business with the most advanced brand protection technology, our team includes professionals with IP expertise and extensive experience working with digital platforms. This includes collaboration with certified lawyers and skilled threat hunters to help address complex online threats effectively.
We partner with brands to ensure that you have the information you need to stay on top of current threats, understand trends, and be up-to-date regarding important developments in your industry.
Get information about brand protection and what threats you need to look out for today. Learn more about these critical industry insights by downloading our new CISO report.
