Threat actors frequently impersonate trusted brands to lend credibility to their attacks. This tactic can surface anywhere online and often makes malicious content appear legitimate at first glance. Because brand abuse is so widespread, security teams must maintain full visibility into the top brand threats targeting their organization and have streamlined workflows to turn potential threats into actionable intelligence.
At their core, digital brand threats are effective because they exploit the trust people place in well-known companies. But beyond that shared tactic, these threats vary widely in form and function. Each type requires a tailored approach to detection, analysis, and mitigation.
In this blog, we break down the four most common types of digital brand threats and share best practices to help minimize their impact.
Domains
- Hosting fraudulent websites
- Hosting malware
- Distributing phishing emails such as BEC
- Diverting website traffic from legitimate sites
- Delivering spam
- Delivering malware lures
- TLD Zone Files
- SSL Certificate Transparency Logs
- DNS Traffic
- DNS Queries
Social Media
Successfully collecting brand intelligence on social media means identifying all platforms that apply to your organization. From there, security teams should mine data using algorithms to find relevant threats. This data should be analyzed by using both threat-specific automated logic as well as human analysis. Takeaways from this multi-stage process should include:
- Threat classification
- Determining severity
- Eliminating false positives
- Adding context
Open Web
Open web threats abuse brands through imposter websites that host unauthorized use of intellectual property, create false associations, and promote illicit activity. Overwhelmingly, brand threats present on the open web involve phishing sites that mislead victims into surrendering their credentials. Threat actors accomplish this by abusing an organization's brand to trick victims into believing they are interacting with a trusted, reputable business.
Sufficiently identifying these sites requires not only extensive visibility across all readily accessible, related content on the web, but also strong anti-evasion detection. Threat actors frequently take steps to prevent automated crawling tools from detecting malicious content.
Collection sources for open web data should include:
- Continuous web crawling
- Search indexes
- Domain registrations
- SSL transparency logs
- Passive and active DNS queries
Because of the massive volume of data available on the open web, security teams should initiate workflows that operate according to specific, relevant threat-types detected. This includes curation particularly designed to increase the speed of mitigation, and overall will result in high-fidelity, actionable intelligence.
Mobile
Threat actors use official company logos, trademarks, and images to impersonate legitimate brands and convince victims to install clones of popular applications.
Learn more about how Fortra Brand Protection helps safeguard your brands from these and other digital threats with our Brand Protection and Digital Risk Protection solutions.
