FeatureOver the last several months, organisations globally have realised the accelerated transformation of work processes, business models and customer relationships as we deal with a global pandemic. How are organisations coping with the dramatically increased public attack surface? Any organisation 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, organisations 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.
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% and fraud and scam incidents online increased by 60%. 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.
Successful DRPS have three distinct elements, insight, understanding and prevention. The combination of these elements can provide a comprehensive layer of protection for organisations online.
As organisations across all industries accelerate digitisation, 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 are not aware of? A crucial first step of DRPS is defining a digital footprint for your organisation 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, organisations can leverage automation to easily lift the weight off of security teams’ shoulders to monitor cyber threats permeating their organisation’s digital footprint. Effective DRPS also allows these teams to better manage multiple technologies for different channels at once.
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 organisation’s digital footprint. Effective DRPS are capable of providing security teams with the right tools to assess and analyse their entire digital landscape. In general, security teams must investigate beyond the channels their organisation owns. With digital risk protection, organisations can do this by detecting all external references related to their brands, customers, products and employees; understanding and analysing whether or not the references are legitimate or signs of impersonation and malicious activity; discovering where the references came from and evaluating threats to prioritise them relative to the risk of what matters most to you.
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 behaviour the second it appears within an organisation’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.
Today, attackers are looking to target public-facing channels. With the digitisation 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 organisation’s digital footprint remains secure from cyber, brand and physical risks.
By Dave Stuart, Senior Director of Product Marketing at ZeroFOX.
