Over the last several months, organizations globally have realized the accelerated transformation of work processes, business models and customer relationships as we deal with a global pandemic. Everything from work from home for employees and digital-first engagement with customers, to new collaborations with partners has impacted how we work and do business. How are organizations coping with the dramatically increased public attack surface? Any organization that conducts business online, promotes products on the web or has customers engaging in its offerings on social media platforms needs to ensure that its public attack surface is safeguarded. If not, organizations are at risk for fraud that targets customers, damages the brand, or even attacks against the company’s assets – i.e. its data, executives and IT infrastructure. These kinds of threats, especially when made public, can significantly damage an organization’s reputation, resulting in the loss of digital trust and reduced revenues, to name a few.
The bad news for businesses is that these types of threats are only increasing, especially since the start of the pandemic. According to recent ZeroFOX research, between January and April 2020, digital threat activity increased by 9 percent, and fraud and scam incidents online increased by 60 percent. With companies relying on their digital presence more than ever during the pandemic, it is vital that they implement comprehensive and strategic Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS).
At a baseline, DRPS are intended to protect organizations from cyber, brand and physical threats. Beyond monitoring the digital footprint of an organization, effective DRPS enables organizations to respond quickly to digital threats and can also provide IT teams with curated threat intelligence to thwart targeted attacks before they happen.
Successful DRPS have three distinct elements – insight, understanding and prevention. The combination of these elements can provide a comprehensive layer of protection for organizations online. Let’s explore what these look like in practice.
Insight into the Digital Landscape
As organizations across all industries accelerate digitization, security teams must invest in the protection of company-owned critical digital assets and channels such as websites, domains, and social media accounts, executive social media accounts and more. But how can you protect what you’re not aware of? A crucial first step of DRPS is defining a digital footprint for your organization that includes both assets that you own and public platforms where you operate.
With a clear understanding of which assets are vulnerable across the digital landscape, organizations can leverage automation to easily lift the weight off of security teams’ shoulders to monitor cyber threats permeating their organization’s digital footprint. Effective DRPS also allows these teams to better manage multiple technologies for different channels at once.
Understanding of Threats Within the Company’s Digital Footprint
Digital risk protection is not only about where to look but also identifying what threats exist. There are several ways that malicious activity can invade an organization’s digital footprint. Effective DRPS are capable of providing security teams with the right tools to assess and analyze their entire digital landscape. In general, security teams must investigate beyond the channels their organization owns. With digital risk protection, organizations can do this by:
- Detecting all external references related to their brands, customers, products and employees
- Understanding and analyzing whether or not the references are legitimate or signs of impersonation and malicious activity
- Discovering where the references came from
- Evaluating threats to prioritize them relative to the risk of what matters most to you
Prevention Capabilities That Get Ahead of Bad Actors
Like all products and services security teams look to invest in, not all DRPS are the same. The most impactful DRP solutions go beyond just being a detection and analysis tool. The true value of these solutions lies in the ability to stop an account hijacker in their tracks or shut down fraudulent behavior the second it appears within an organization’s digital footprint — before lasting damage is done. Reliable DRPS is built with advanced artificial intelligence and sync with networks and hosts via API integrations to take down credible threats quickly.
Selecting the Right DRPS for Your Organization’s Security Needs
Now that you understand the benefits of having reliable DRPS to protect your organization’s digital footprint, it’s time to select the right solution for your organization. There are many DRPS vendors to consider, but not all are built equally. Before taking the plunge, make sure that your DRPS of choice meets this criterion:
- Protects your complete digital footprint
- Has the ability to monitor and assess a wide breadth of social and digital platforms, including global and regional social networks, popular websites, online forums, blogs, review sites, and mobile app stores, codeshares, and more
- Effectively uses AI-based technologies to process advanced and obfuscated threats at a scale that far surpasses human analysis
- Has built-in automation and ease of management features such as API connections to social media and web platforms
- Has built-in remediation and takedown capabilities with the ability to initiate and quickly complete takedowns efficiently
- Has the ability to produce and use contextual and prioritized threat intelligence and provides options for curated strategic intelligence and custom investigations
Today, attackers are looking to target public-facing channels. With the digitization of the business world, it has become evident that security teams must turn to DRPS to protect their public attack surface from emerging threats. Using this to guide your DRPS implementation will ensure that your organization’s digital footprint remains secure from cyber, brand and physical risks.
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