The COVID-19 pandemic use to have altered our personal and professional lives. Due to employees working from home, companies have been forced to expand their network perimeter and accelerate their digital transformation efforts across the board.Outside of the authorities, the latter push resulted in the hurried adoption of new systems and services, necessitating thoughtful efforts and painstaking technological awarenessfor protecting these new attack surfaces.
The game of online incidenceuse to be also changing as a result of digital transformation. If you sell physical goods, for example, you can no longer afford to ignore digital channels.Having an online presence ten to fifteen years ago meant having a web page with your phone number and email address, and perhaps a rudimentary web shop. Today, digital transformation has opened new channels for companies to directly engage with customers, such as social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) and e-commerce platforms (eBay, Amazon, AliExpress).
Companies use these digital channels to improve their digital status by combining their individual assets (branding, logo, and marketing strategy) with the activities of their customers (e.g., quality feedback about the product or service). However, the internet was never intended to be a secure environment, and it is difficult to predict how it will be abused.Criminals can use logos, content, offers, and partnerships to “make” money. Companies must take proactive steps to protect their brand and reputation, as well as to reduce or eliminate this digital risk.
Here are some examples of malicious behaviour that can put a company’s digital security at risk:
Scammers who use the company’s brand to promise quick profits and/or sell counterfeit goods bearing the company’s name
Leaks in reputation
Advertisements for a fake partnership with the logo of the company
Phishing attacks that make use of a company’s name
In added words, these threats use to exist outside of your network’s perimeter and can be extremely damaging to your reputation and brand.
The number of scammers is increasing every day, necessitating the development of new tools and techniques to combat them.Furthermore, the internet is much bigger than what is immediately visible, and businesses should be aware that fraudulent activities that harm their reputation are common on the dark web and hidden services.
Into this review, we’ll look at Group-IB Digital Risk Protection, an Al-based product that can help you detect and protect your digital assets from being misused.
Digital Risk Defence
Group-IB Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is a tool that helps businesses protect their intellectual property internally, on the indexed web, and on the dark web (sites with the “.onion” domain that can only be accessed with specialised software). This is accomplished by monitoring the entire online space for brand mentions and prioritising threats and actions using machine learning algorithms.
The Group-IB DRP on-boarding process begins with defining the company’s digital assets that must be protected. The DRP Customer Success team manages this step, guiding users through the process of registering their business and assessing and defining the digital footprint they want to protect.Clients will soon be able to configure all of those settings themselves, but support for properly tuning and configuring Group-IB DRP will continue to be provided (if needed).
Users can begin monitoring their organization’s digital footprint after completing registration and onboarding, or they can choose a licence type that includes monitoring by Group-IB analysts.
When users log into Group-IB DRP, they are greeted with a simple dashboard that displays their company’s overall risk level as well as events that require attention.They can filter the results in the dashboard if they are monitoring multiple companies or brands.
Group-IB DRP scrapes and analyses the web and tracks the company’s digital presence based on their brand profile.
It is constantly monitoring the following sources:
- Domain names and their reputation
- Social media
- Websites
- Marketplaces, classifieds and online ads
- Mobile application stores (non-official and official)
- Instant messaging platforms
The dark web and the deep web
Every day, Group-IB DRP collects and analyses over 3 million events. The monitoring phase sends early warnings about brand mentions and assigns a risk score based on the type and priority of misuse based on the content.The Group-IB DRP assists users in deciding how to approach and work on a specific incident, as well as when to enlist the help of Group-IB analysts to assess the most difficult cases.
Group-IB DRP’s main goal happens to be to stop data, revenue, and reputational fatalities.
The platform has five main modules to protect a company’s digital presence from common threats:
Anti-Counterfeit: Protection and detection of illegal sales of goods or counterfeit versions, cases of copyright infringement, and partnership agreement violations
Anti-Scam: phishing and scams, fake partnerships and trademark abuse, fake accounts, fake advertisements, brand impersonation on social media, and fake mobile apps are all examples of online abuse.
Leak Detection: Detection of sensitive data that has been exposed on the internet or the dark web, code leaks, credentials that have been leaked, or sensitive data that has been exposed
Anti-Piracy: Monitoring torrent trackers, streaming services, or pirated stages on social media and the dark web to preclude illegal distribution of digital content in all forms (audio, video, software, streaming services, computer games, articles, books, and so on). On average, pirated content is detected in less than 30 minutes, and most illegal copies are completely blocked in less than 7 days.
VIP Protection: Monitoring and blocking fake accounts for C-level executives, as well as digital appearance analysis and data monitoring.
Group-IB DRP can detect brand mentions in domain names and text content, as well as images that use logos incorrectly. From all of the analysed resources, the organization’s brand’s average (general) risk score is calculated.Machine learning algorithms detect more than 90% of cases of brand violation, as well as calculating the overall risk score and detecting unusual scammer behaviours and patterns. The risk scores, in addition to serving as violations notifications, also help to prioritise alerts and are rechecked and updated on a regular basis.
