2023 Threat Landscape: What Brands Need to Know.
Trademark Infringement, phishing attacks, social media scams, and paid ad fraud are among the top-ranking cyber threats facing brands today. And as technology continues to evolve, cybercriminals refine their strategies and techniques, and the threat landscape changes accordingly.
The bad news is that traditional measures are limited in terms of their ability to combat and mitigate these threats. Traditional cybersecurity measures are limited in their ability to combat and mitigate modern threats. With the help of AI tools, cybercriminals are creating more convincing phishing and impersonation attacks with compelling texts free of spelling and grammar errors. Furthermore, the use of more realistic fake domains and login portals means that classic cybersecurity techniques are not enough to identify these critical threats.
It’s clear that a different approach is needed to effectively protect brands from cyber threats in 2023.
What is Proactive Threat Hunting?
Unlike reactive threat management, which sees companies pressured to clean up the mess after a successful cyber attack, proactive threat hunting refers to the strategy of seeking out and identifying potential threats before the damage is done.
Needless to say, with this strategy, your business will be able to detect threats early, giving you the opportunity to formulate an appropriate response before serious damage occurs. You also gain the ability to remove threats early, which helps minimize or prevent financial losses or harm to your brand reputation. You'll also be able to regain control over the digital landscape and your brand’s place in it, rather than scrambling to respond to threats and violations as they happen.
Overall, proactive threat hunting gives you the most valuable asset there is when it comes to cybersecurity: time. You’ll gain time to respond to threats, time to remove violations such as trademark infringement, and time that’s crucial for preventing catastrophes.
Best Practices for Proactive Threat Hunting
For robust, proactive threat hunting, you need the best of both worlds: skilled cybersecurity and legal experts and industry-leading technology.
Skilled, experienced cybersecurity and legal teams, preferably specializing in Intellectual Property, are necessary for a threat hunting process. These human experts should be able to work in harmony with machine learning and automation-based technology, which improves the efficiency of proactive threat hunting.
It’s also critical to consistently and regularly monitor your program to ensure that you know what your hunting, in order to cover your organization’s needs. This includes keeping up-to-date with trending attack strategies that have proven to be efficient and are increasing in popularity, or risk being vulnerable to more modern threats; Threats to your company as well as your clients. Since the landscape is constantly shifting, you need to develop new protocols for attack strategies that you may not have even been aware of previously. If you find that your proactive threat hunting initiative isn’t up to par, you should adjust it as needed.
Analyze where your company is most at risk, and what kind of attacks would be most effective if leveraged against your business. Run threat modeling exercises, such as sending your employees a realistic phishing email, to gauge whether they’re likely to fall victim to a threat.
Your organization’s people are often the last line of defense between your business and an online threat, and you should take that reality seriously. This means that you should be investing in ongoing training and education within your company to teach employees how to recognize threats and what their next steps should be if they’re targeted by a cybercriminals.
Proactive Threat Hunting with BrandShield
BrandShield is an industry-leading force in proactive threat hunting, providing you with the best of both worlds: a seasoned team of IP experts and cybersecurity professionals, along with a platform that leverages proprietary technology to detect and identify online threats as swiftly as possible.
For a free assessment of the online threats facing your business, book a free demo today. If you’d like to learn more about how we can safeguard your business with proactive threat hunting, get in touch with us.