Digital risk protection is mission critical for brands today
With expanded marketplaces, social media, and more people working and buying online, 2021 saw close to a 20% spike in data breaches. So you have to ask, is your digital risk protection solution strong enough to protect you from innovative new scams? Does it involve a takedown team or does all the pressure fall on your internal team, or even worse, on a single individual?
Having full digital risk protection today is vital and it is equally important to handle this protection in a manner that relieves pressure on your business. A robust digital risk protection strategy that leverages both cyber-focused and legal support has become mission critical. The market has proven that legal firepower is also needed for effective brand protection.
Counterfeit sales
This scam sees cybercriminals illegally copying a brand’s logo and design, and selling a product - typically of inferior quality - which purports to be a genuine item from a specific brand.
Gray market sales
A legal “gray” area which straddles the line between legitimate and illegal. In this scenario, genuine products from a specific brand are sold by sellers who did not receive authorization from the brand.
Trademark infringement
Trademark infringement occurs when websites and/or social media pages include any unlawful use of a company's trademarks, logos, and registered signs or symbols.
Brand abuse
In this scenario, third-parties illegally use your brand and its related intellectual property (IP) for financial gain or in order to damage your reputation.
When it comes to impersonating your brand, cybercriminals have become more and more sophisticated in their imitations. They have a variety of schemes from trademark or copyright infringement to creating spoof URLS to trick unsuspecting customers, "Brand impersonation has increased in its fidelity, in the sense that, at least from a visual [perspective], something that is malicious brand impersonation can look identical to the actual, legitimate content," says Justin Grana, an applied researcher at Microsoft. "There's no more copy-and-paste, or jagged logos.” This simply means that businesses need more sophisticated solutions to protect themselves.
What Digital Risk Protection Solutions brings to the table?
When gauging the efficiency of your current digital risk protection strategy, you should review the following components of your approach.
Scope of coverage
Do your digital risk protection tools scan for both immediate and sophisticated threats?
Immediate threats are listings on marketplaces and eCommerce websites. Sophisticated threats are non-infringing domain websites, clone sites and social media impersonation.
Technology aspects
Does your digital risk protection platform scan and monitor your visual IP, such as images and trademarks? Your solution should utilize clustering technology to uncover links between rogue sites and product pages.
Takedown capabilities
Arguably one of the most crucial elements of your digital risk protection strategy is the ability to takedown problematic listings and ads. When judging the efficacy of your takedown strategy, you should consider the following two questions:
- What precisely can your service providers handle? You should understand exactly who is in charge of detecting and removing listings - are they analysts or enforcement managers? This directly impacts their takedown management strategy and success rates; enforcement managers are able to determine the correct course of action for any threat facing your company, while analysts have a more limited ability
- Are takedowns done automatically or manually? The way in which your service provider manages takedowns can make a huge difference. Automated takedowns minimize damage, by controlling for human error with machine efficiency. Not only this, but it speeds up the takedown process as a whole.
Seamless Internal collaboration is needed
With so many different moving parts in play, it’s critical that your digital risk protection solution enables different teams within your organization to work together, seamlessly. Most importantly, your digital risk protection tool should allow for synergy between your legal and cybersecurity teams, enabling smooth takedowns. In addition, sharing resources between departments will save both time and money, which benefits the company overall in the long run.
See what our digital risk solution could do for your business
Brand oriented digital risk protection: the 2023 way
The traditional brand protection essentials are still important and relevant, as are the foundations of traditional DRP solutions. Brands in 2023, however, must go a step further in order to protect their reputations and bottom lines.
Brand oriented digital risk protection includes all the staple features of traditional brand protection, but adds other elements that are critical in the modern online landscape. With this, companies can identify and protect themselves from fraud and data leakage that occurs outside their firewalls, beyond their reach.
When a single data breach costs companies on average $3.86 million, it’s clear that brands must do everything possible to protect their businesses. Creating synergy between the legal and cybersecurity departments contributes greatly to brand protection; legal experts handle takedowns, dealing with any IP issues that come up.
Effective brand oriented digital risk protection must include:
- Brand Protection
- Social Media Impersonation Protection
- Actionable Threat Intelligence
- Threat Hunting And Disruption
- Fraud Campaign Protection
BrandShield, a brand oriented digital risk protection platform, leverages advanced AI to provide our clients with A to Z, complete brand defense. We offer our customers AI-enhanced:
- Proactive, 360 degree monitoring - this includes websites, domain names, social media, mobile apps and paid ads.
- Web fraud protection - against website phishing, domain spoofing, typosquatting, and online fraud networks.
- Social media protection - Monitoring all major social media platforms to detect both brand and executive impersonation.
- Advanced anti phishing methods - this involves innovative features such as Website Duplication Detector, automated takedown notices, and blacklists to name just a few.
- 24/7 threat hunting - handled by experts with IP and legal background and extensive experience working with digital platforms
- Full access and transparency into our process for our clients - all this data is fully accessible in the SaaS platform
AI-supported, complete brand oriented digital risk management that matters
Leveraging advanced AI for our brand protection platform has allowed us to protect brands better, in a holistic way. We can connect several stakeholders from within an organization and provide the symbiotic, efficient external threat protection that matters for their business' unique needs.
In our recent Fake to Fraud webinar, TTI noted that their security success using BrandShield included a 97.9% removal rate for fake websites, 98.4% for marketplaces, and 99% for social media profiles.
We cover a range of aspects that our competitors aren’t addressing. Our complete brand-oriented digital risk protection solution covers all the bases, by protecting against trademark infringement and executive impersonation, counterfeit sales and phishing attacks, all in one platform.
Takedowns are launched and managed by experienced enforcement managers and threat hunters with extensive backgrounds in IP, giving your business the benefit of a knowledgeable team that knows the ins and outs of the space.
BrandShield’s full SaaS platform includes robust auto-detection, full case management, and easy access to activity reports. We monitor social media coverage with dedicated crawlers to 13 social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. Our rich content analysis tools detect scams on social networks, helping your brand save time and money.
Our deep investigation capabilities ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. To learn more about how BrandShield can protect your business from online digital risk:
