Law & Order: Why Legal and Cybersecurity Teams Go Together
The battle to protect against online phishing scams has two fronts. The first front is the employee-facing phishing attacks used to gain access to your internal networks; the second front is customer-facing phishing attacks which leads to revenue loss. Cybersecurity and Legal teams often find themselves competing over the same budgets to protect the organization and its revenue. It’s time to end this feud and join forces to fight the good fight.
Protecting business assets: The critical role of cybersecurity
Legislation is important, but it’s far from enough to protect businesses from cyber threats. After all, most threat actors know that what they’re doing is wrong, even if the law doesn’t specify it. Laws help companies state their ground in protecting themselves, but cybersecurity solutions like anti-phishing technologies make this protection feasible.
No company should rely on regulation alone without implementing cybersecurity tools and policies to complete the puzzle. Ed McNicholas, a cybersecurity law expert, said, “Cybersecurity preparedness requires a practical focus on dedicating resources to reduce the operational risk of cyber incidents, but it also requires implementing – and living by – procedures and plans to respond when the inevitable occurs.”
The long list of threats includes phishing attacks that require dedicated anti-phishing solutions, company impersonation, counterfeiting, trademark infringement, social media fraud, and more. Handling these threats includes detecting and preventing them, removing threats that have managed to infiltrate the system, and recovering any data loss.
BrandShield’s solution, for example, not only analyzes and detects potential cybersecurity risks due to phishing and completes the cycle by removing these risks before they cause any damage. BrandShield’s protection of the Levi’s® brand has managed to detect 429 new fraudulent domain names in a large scale phishing attack and remove 90% immediately.
You can’t have one without the other
You can’t protect what you don’t own. Intangible concepts, like brand abuse or infringement, must be adequately defined for the company to become protectable. The law brings brands and trademarks to life and draws the boundaries around it. The law helps companies and individuals understand their right to protection and lets fraudsters and scammers know that their actions are unlawful.
This essential role grows more complicated as technology evolves and new ideas and definitions are born. Many people and organizations would argue that there’s plenty of room for improvement in that sense, and the law isn’t going far enough, but we see continuous growth and serious work in that area. Currently, trademark law creates and protects different aspects of brand identity, including its name, logo, and tagline. Legal intervention can help define ownership over brand assets through trademarks, copyrights, and patents.
Revenue protection: The crucial combination of cybersecurity & legal work
The Legal team is responsible for managing the company’s Intellectual Property (IP) protection and enforcing it through any required legal steps. Legal advisors will map the company’s assets and under which laws each one is protected. In case of an infringement, they will inform authorities and any relevant party regarding the exact rules that have been violated. The Legal team will make sure that the company uses all available measures to protect itself and its revenue..
On the other end, the cybersecurity team will monitor all mapped assets of a company or its executives to detect and prevent risks. They will alert the legal team of any issues and help them translate the tech talk into legal talk. Cybersecurity professionals will prevent cyber criminals from reaching company employees and customers by using advanced anti-phishing solutions. Finally, the cybersecurity team will remove threats that found their way into the company’s applications and ensure that any information lost in the process is retrieved.
For this joint effort to succeed, excellent communication between team members and leaders in both departments is essential. CISOs and Legal Advisors must appreciate each other’s work and consider themselves partners, not competitors. Organizations should focus on building a bridge between their legal and cybersecurity experts, developing and improving this relationship over time.
Invite your cybersecurity and legal teams to learn more about the leading anti-phishing solutions provided by BrandShield and schedule your demo today.
