Risks to Online Brands Skyrocket Heading into 2022
As we kick off 2022, many of the same storylines from 2021 prevail. Businesses big and small continue to expand their digital presence and customer touch points across a myriad of web properties, social media platforms, app stores and marketplaces. And hackers and fraudsters continue to keep pace with increasingly more sophisticated mechanisms to defraud businesses and customers across what is commonly referred to as a company’s Internet Attack Surface.
The types of attacks and fraud are many spanning classic phishing credential theft and account takeovers, to business email compromise and executive impersonations, to fake apps and marketplace infringements.
InfoSec to the Rescue
The scale of these online attacks and the inevitable security implications have led many business to the conclusion that modern brand protection programs should ultimately be spearheaded by InfoSec teams. In fact, we closed out last year with a lively webcast featuring Senior Instructor Jake Williams from the SANS Institute and our very own co-founder and CTO, Shashi Prakash where they discussed this point in detail. We also issued a companion white paper/product evaluation that Jake penned. Read here an excerpt where Jake characterizes the brand protection problem and the dependencies on InfoSec:
Brand protection traditionally has been the job of the organization’s legal team, although in some cases the job fell to the marketing team. While some brand protection operations still require intervention from the legal team, the primary duties are rapidly shifting to information security teams. This move makes sense. Even though legal or marketing teams might identify a counterfeit application in an app store, they ultimately must rely on the information security team for capability analysis of the application.
Similarly, when customers complain that they are receiving phishing emails harvesting credentials for your site, the information security team always plays a major role in the investigation. In many cases, information security also receives the initial report for this activity. Although other units in the organization may be involved in remediation of select incidents, practically every online brand protection incident involves the information security team.
Put bluntly, brand security is information security.
And listen to the wake-up call that Jake provides in the webcast. As in the paper, he is unequivocal on the role that InfoSec teams must play in securing a company’s online brand and presence.
And hear Shashi expand on the many digital touch points and brand threats that exist in this clip from the webcast.
I encourage you to listen to the webcast in its entirety as it is both lively and informative throughout. Jake and Shashi build on this InfoSec theme as they deep dive into the Bolster platform and many of its capabilities. It’s a great opportunity to get a practitioner’s view into how Bolster helps organization discover and mitigate online brand risks. I would also encourage to you to download the product evaluation write-up as well as it is equally informative for security practitioners.
Bolster Your Brand Protection Today!
Now more than ever is the time to put a modern brand protection program in place for your online business. And here are three simple steps you can take to get there:
- Check out our recently issued Definitive Guide to Modern Brand Protection. You’ll find it helpful as you dimension the risks to your online business and as you construct a brand protection program that’s right for you.
- Request a free, no obligation, domain risk report. It’s a great (and fast) way to assess risks to your Internet domains, risks that could manifest themselves as typosquatting attacks or business email compromise attacks at any moment.
- Download our free whitepaper on Best Practices for Modern Brand Protection
- Book a private demo. See the Bolster platform in action for yourself and how it can protect your online business and brand.
Together, let’s put an end to online fraud in 2022!
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Resources:
SANS Webcast Featuring Jake Williams & Shashi Prakash
SANS Product Evaluation by Jake Williams
Bolster Brand Protection solutions
