As businesses expand their digital footprint, protecting your brand online has become a critical part of staying competitive and secure. What happens online doesn’t stay online — it can damage your reputation, erode customer trust, and hit your bottom line.
Protecting your brand means gaining full visibility into your digital assets, actively monitoring them, and staying ahead of threats. It requires time, the right expertise, and smart tools. Without them, preventable attacks can slip through the cracks.
In this blog, we break down what digital brand protection is, why it matters, and how to build it into your cybersecurity strategy.
Why Everybody Needs Digital Brand Protection in 2025
First of all, what is digital brand protection? It’s the set of techniques and policies used to protect a company’s online image from damage by things like impersonation, fraud, and the theft of sensitive proprietary information and intellectual property.
Digital brand protection is more than an added extra, meant to offer peripheral protection against potential threats. And it is more than an increased tool in your internal security arsenal. It is an acknowledgement that an organization go under because of reputational damage – a hacked social media post, a domain that spams their customers, a deepfake “from” their CEO – and without a specific action plan to stop them, traditional security tools will never go far enough.
Understanding Digital Brand Threats
Let’s dig into specifics. What constitutes a digital brand threat? Common threats to your digital presence include:
Phishing: When attackers phish your customers, they take your hard-won reputation into their hands and use it for their gain through brand impersonation. Playing off the trust you have established with your base, they get your customers to click into a malicious email and enter personal information that will result in a personal data breach.
This directly impacts brand trust and leads to fraud loss. In cases where your domain has been compromised completely – and not just spoofed – it can even result in a blacklisting.
Impersonation: Attackers using AI love to impersonate executives (and anybody) online. In a recent survey, approximately 40% of respondents said that one of their executives was targeted in a deepfake attack this year, and over 50% said that an executive at their organization was targeted personally overall.
Threat actors live to exploit our trust, and when the word is coming from our “boss,” we are likely to listen. This leads to high rates of Business Email Compromise (BEC), public embarrassment, and a lot of PR work after the fact.
Counterfeit websites: You know how hard you work to keep your website up, running, and professional – or your web team does. It’s detrimental to a company’s online image when hackers take over that image by spoofing their website, luring customers in and duping them with fake links, stolen credentials, and a terrible online experience.
These are things that could lead to loss of customer trust, reputational damage, and a sour taste in consumers’ mouths that lead them to lower sales and steer away from your brand. Even if it isn’t your fault, domain abuse via “your website” can leave an indelible impression of mistrust. Better to catch and take down these threats before the damage is done.
Social media abuse: The same can be said of what is said and done in the name of your social media account. Recently, “[social media] accounts pretending to belong to high-ranking executives on social media climbed to more than 54% of total impersonation volume, surpassing brand attacks for the first time since Fortra began tracking this data.”
And it’s not very hard to do; earlier this year, Alen Cohen, CEO of Hello Patient, altered his LinkedIn title to read “CEO of LinkedIn,” with the goal of proving that LinkedIn still “doesn't add any verification to prove you work or previously worked at a company.” As Cohen asserted, the error was, remarkably, not caught, validating the fact that no verification process was in effect. Understanding how easy it is to impersonate high-profile executives online, organizations should pay close and constant attention to their employees’ online reputations, and how they are being handled – or mishandled.
Other threats include unauthorized mobile threats, counterfeit ads, traffic diversion, look-alike domains, and various forms of unauthorized association
Want to learn more? Check out Fortra’s Brand Threats Masterclass.
Why Proactive Brand Protection Matters
The key shift in brand protection is recognizing that cybersecurity traditionally focused inward on assets and infrastructure within an organization’s direct control. That focus made sense, given that’s where most sensitive data and core business operations reside.
Brand protection, however, is different. The threats don’t occur within the corporate environment but across external platforms and infrastructure that fall outside the security team’s control and often their visibility.
This changes the game entirely. Internal alerts can be handled quietly, away from public view. But when an “alert” is your CEO’s hijacked X account announcing fake layoffs, the damage is already done. There’s no room for reactive thinking. By the time customers, partners, or the press see it, it’s too late. These real-world threats unfold in plain sight and strike directly at your brand’s reputation. Staying ahead of them isn’t just smart, it’s essential.
When it comes to brand protection, deliberate and public-facing attacks can’t be passively discovered, they must be actively hunted. Waiting for them to come to your attention means the damage has already been done. That’s why a successful brand protection strategy must be proactive.
Proactive brand protection provides:
Early detection: Hunt down instances of executive impersonation, spoofed domains, and false websites. The point is to find potential threats early on – before your customers, news outlets, and the public do.
Analysis of public-facing threats: Once these threats are discovered, brand protection analyzes them to see how much of a risk they present to your online reputation and brand in general. This demonstrates a sense of priority, so your security operations center (SOC) knows which threats to go after first.
Aggressive mitigation: After assessing discovered threats, a brand protection strategy will put all the pieces into action necessary to remove them, based on severity. This includes takedowns of impersonating websites and social media posts, legal action with cease-and-desist letters, and the operational disruption of those engaging in brand abuse online.
Specific strategies:
Identifying brand-specific cyber threats: Finding instances of where your brand has been impersonated online, targeted on the dark web, or otherwise threatened digitally and taking them down.
Domain monitoring: Actively monitoring (i.e., tracking) your domain for any changes, threats, and unauthorized activity.
Social media protection: Gain visibility across social networks, code repositories, gripe sites, and forums.
Counterfeit protection: Prevent attackers from impersonating your brand and cannibalizing your sales. Take down counterfeit ads and websites to preserve your customer trust.
Not only does digital risk protection secure your public image, but it also helps you stop in-progress attacks. Finding these online liabilities before they come to the public’s attention can save countless dollars in PR clean up and campaigns to regain customer trust.
Engaging with a Brand Protection Services Provider
Digital brand protection requires in-depth understanding
Understanding the scope of digital brand protection can make organizations s feel one thing – overwhelmed. It takes skills and special know-how to infiltrate underground digital marketplaces, monitor the dark web, scan across social media sites, watch for compromised domains, and more.
As noted in Fortra’s CISO Guide: Defending the Brand, “To protect their brand effectively, organizations must adopt a multi-platform monitoring strategy that leverages advanced detection tools to identify threats across domains, social media platforms, and even repositories like GitHub.”
It also takes a fair number of cycles – cycles that many strapped internal SOCs already don’t have. And yet the threat of brand impersonation is as high for teams that don’t protect as for teams that do, if not more.
For this reason, many turn to a brand protection services provider. A specialized vendor with brand protection experience is invaluable when looking to secure against modernizing digital threats, especially given new outlets like AI and ever-changing tactics.
Favoring a collaborative approach
A collaborative approach to digital brand management can put organizations at the helm while leveraging the services of best-in-the-business experts. These seasoned security providers understand where digital threats are hiding, how they are evolving, what the threat intelligence reveals, and how to protect a world-class brand. And this also includes collaborating with internal teams. As stated in the CISO Guide, “Traditionally, brand protection was considered the domain of marketing teams,” but “today, CISOs are increasingly involved.” As CISO lean into their “essential role” to see brand protection not as a technical problem but a business-driving solution, organizations can make more headway with the key buy-in they need.
Fortra Brand Protection offers a range of digital brand protection solutions for securing your name and reputation at any stage. As cybercriminals come up with increasingly clever tactics, it is collaborative partnerships like these that will help businesses defend on all fronts.
Ready to begin? Let our SMEs show you Fortra Brand Protection in action, request a demo today.
