More Than Brand Monitoring Is Needed To Protect Your Brand

Your brand is incredibly valuable. It’s the driving force behind customer, employee, and partner trust. Threats to your brand threaten the very foundation that this trust is built upon.

Typosquat websites, leaked data, and command-and-control attacks are all examples of how threat actors may attack your brand. The repercussions can be devastating — ranging from customer distrust to massive financial losses. A prime example is the 2017 Equifax breach. Several years later, people still associate their brand with the breach.

Protecting your brand is critical. However, more often than not, organizations are blindsided by cyber attacks targeting their brand. That’s because most security professionals have limited visibility outside of their own organizations’ network — and zero visibility into the nefarious corners of the web where cybercriminals are known to plan and launch attacks.

Too frequently, analysts spend valuable time pouring over disconnected keyword-based data points to find cyber attacks that have already begun chipping away at their brand’s integrity. An effective brand protection solution shouldn’t merely hack together old data points — it needs to deliver relevant and contextual intelligence to prevent attacks from happening in the first place.

This is why brand monitoring alone isn’t enough to protect your brand. You need brand intelligence to proactively protect your brand. Don’t get me wrong — brand monitoring solutions are a great tool for surfacing all mentions of your brand on open web sources. However, simply monitoring for brand mentions isn’t enough to detect and prevent cyber attacks. Surfacing every mention of your brand, products, etc. is a surefire way to get extreme alert fatigue. In short, it's not strategic.

Brand intelligence, on the other hand, takes brand monitoring to the next level. It surfaces the most relevant and actionable brand mentions. It’s not enough to know every mention of your brand on Twitter or Facebook. To effectively protect your brand, you need to strategically surface the company, product, and brand mentions that indicate that your brand is potentially under attack. This includes intelligence around leaked credentials, brand impersonation, phishing, and more.

Dynamic brand intelligence at scale empowers security teams to proactively detect and take action against brand attacks in real time — before they damage the business.

Brand Monitoring Versus Brand Intelligence

As you can see in the diagram above brand monitoring is broader than brand intelligence. When you only use brand monitoring you are not seeing all the relevant information you need to protect your brand. Using brand intelligence allows you to surface relevant mentions of your brand, products, and assets. Brand intelligence also sources data from the widest breadth and variety of open and closed sources, and includes intelligence around domain abuse and data leaks. Brand intelligence provides a carefully calculated risk and score content, providing you with actionable information to protect your brand. Brand intelligence is a smarter version of brand monitoring, and leads to more protection.

Monitor Your Brand with The Brand Intelligence Module

Recorded Future's Brand Intelligence Module provides unmatched visibility into threats that were previously difficult or impossible for organizations to identify. By collecting data and intelligence from an unrivaled quantity and variety of open, closed, and technical sources, the brand intelligence module delivers the context you need to proactively defend your brand against cyber attacks. We even assist you in taking down attacks with built-in takedown services that go the last mile to simplify and expedite the removal of malicious content from the internet.

Recorded Future combines analytics with human expertise to produce elite security intelligence that disrupts adversaries at scale. More than simply monitoring keywords, dynamic brand intelligence enables you to instantly identify relationships between emerging threats, your brands, and your infrastructure to deliver easy-to-consume brand intelligence. Proactively detect brand attacks as they surface — and take them down before they damage your business. Recorded Future makes it easy to protect your brand by empowering you to detect and take action against:

Domain Abuse

Get up-to-minute intelligence about copycat websites and typosquat domains as soon as they are registered and when they are weaponized. Dynamic risk scores paired with unprecedented context enable you to pivot and dig deeper into associated IPs and domains. Then, take immediate action by reporting and initiating a takedown request directly within Recorded Future’s platform.

Brand Impersonation

Domain abuse isn’t the only way to detect account harvesting campaigns. Unauthorized logo use and fake mobile applications are just a few ways threat actors may impersonate your brand to dupe your customers.

Data and Credential Leaks

Manually searching for leaked company data and credentials on paste sites and the dark web is next to impossible, not to mention dangerous. Recorded Future instantly processes information across these sites — including criminal forums that sell sensitive data — and instantly alerts you when there is a data or credential leak involving your brand. We even cache these posts for you to review and escalate.

Infrastructure Risk

Continuous monitoring for threats against your infrastructure is the only way to proactively prevent attacks that could have otherwise launched undetected. Recorded Future delivers configurable alerts around your domains and IP addresses that empower you to swiftly secure your network when there are malicious mentions of your organization’s assets.

Brand Attacks

As mentioned earlier, organizations often start their brand protection efforts with brand monitoring solutions. But closed criminal-access forums, social media channels, and foreign language sites are the real breeding ground for threat actors’ ploys. Most brand monitoring solutions don’t reach these corners of the web. Recorded Future does — instantly detecting, alerting you, and empowering you to take action — regardless of where your brand is mentioned in reference to a cyber attack.

Executive Impersonation

Impersonating your brand isn’t the only way threat actors can damage your brand and reputation. Fake executive profiles are another vector for distributing malicious URLs and disparaging your reputation. Recorded Future identifies newly registered executive profiles on social media and gives you the tools to take them down before they are weaponized.

Industry Threats

If cybercriminals are targeting your industry or your peers, it is likely that they’ll be knocking on your door next. Recorded Future surfaces known and emerging threats to your industry and organizations like yours, empowering you to proactively defend against the very risks that threaten your brand and infrastructure.

See Brand Intelligence In Action Right Now

Brand intelligence arms organizations with unmatched visibility to proactively protect their brand. By surfacing relevant and actionable intelligence, it enables you to defend your organization from the most common brand attacks. See Recorded Future’s Brand Intelligence Module in action with a live demo from our team.