Combatting Data and Credential Exposure With Intelligence

Throughout 2021, organizations faced a variety of cyber threats targeting their brands. While threats affecting brands, such as typosquats, domain abuse, and data exposure, do not garner as much attention as ransomware attacks, it is crucial that organizations actively respond to and mitigate these threats. Threats to brands affect organizations in every sector, both public and private, and can be used as staging grounds by attackers for future cyberattacks.

According to the 2021 Brand Intelligence Trends report by Insikt Group®, data exposure continued to be a persistent threat to organizations across all industries. Data exposure can be caused by a variety of means, such as misconfigured databases and poor security protecting data held within these repositories. 

Several organizations felt the repercussions of poor data security in 2021 when millions of their records were exposed and in some instances illegally accessed by threat actors to be sold online to other cybercriminals. In fact, the average total cost of a data breach in the United States, the country with the highest average cost for 11 years in a row, increased to $9.05 million from $8.64 million, and the average total cost globally was $4.24 million USD in 2021.

The Impact of Exposed Data and Credentials

The information found in data breaches often consists of customer or employee data including PII, which poses a critical risk to organizations everywhere. In fact, according to the 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, 61% of breaches involve compromised credentials, and every year billions of credentials appear on the dark web, paste sites, and in data dumps shared by cybercriminals.  

Cybercriminals often purchase leaked credentials from these sources in hopes of gaining a foothold into organizations in order to conduct phishing and spearphishing attacks, brute-force password cracking attacks, exfiltrate information, initiate ransomware, and more. Resetting passwords for leaked credentials isn’t difficult, but maintaining the widespread visibility necessary to discover when leaked credentials appear is far more challenging. 

Unable to monitor the places where the most common brand attacks take root - dark and closed web sources, as well as social media - organizations are left exposed to financial, legal, and reputational consequences. Security teams miss vital intelligence about the elevated risk to their brand or infrastructure, can’t identify upcoming brand attacks, and are left scrambling to respond once the attacks are underway.

The Visibility To Act Faster

To truly protect your brand, your security team needs expertise and assistance in order to collect mass amounts of data, sift through thousands of data points, analyze relationships among the data points, decide on priorities, and ultimately take action. 

Brand Intelligence from Recorded Future gives teams actionable, up-to-the-minute analytical insights to proactively defend against new and emerging threats to your brand, products, employees, executives, and customers. By automatically collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data from an unrivaled range of sources spanning the open, closed, deep and dark web, in real time; security teams are able to proactively detect and take down malicious sites faster and more efficiently.

To learn more about the top threats targeting your brand, including how you can combat data and credential exposure with intelligence, watch this on-demand webinar now