Best practices for good brand and digital brand protection emphasize preventing brand abuse, identifying threats and responding rapidly in digital channels in order to protect customers and revenue. A strong brand protection strategy consolidates a company’s legal, security, and threat intelligence capabilities into a single, ongoing program rather than a one-time initiative.
What is digital brand protection?
Digital brand protection refers to the collection of protocols, tools and procedures that help protect your brand name, domains, logos, products and executives across web, social, marketplaces, and the dark web. Strong brand protection will also keep the scammers from impersonating your organization, distributing counterfeit products, or abusing your intellectual property in order to target your customers.
A modern brand protection solution often comes bundled with a combination of digital risk protection (DRP), threat intelligence, and automation that allows for takedown capabilities. It can be used to work from a common vision of brand abuse, phishing, fraud, and reputational risk between security, legal and marketing teams.
Map your digital risk landscape
Before they use the tools, organizations need to see where and how their brand is being exposed online before they use tools, and how they use these and should make sure to ask themselves. This does so by determining specific domains and subdomains, social accounts, executive profiles, mobile apps, marketplace listings, and third-party sites that your brand can be found and used by clients where applicable.
Risk assessments might also include potential threat scenarios such as phishing, domain spoofing, counterfeit products, fake support websites, or leaks of credentials. By increasing their rank, prioritizing such threats by probability and the potential impacts helps drive brand protection strategies towards the most significant attack vectors first.
Create a sound legal and governance structure
Defending the digital brand is most effective with legal rights and internal policies. Registering trademarks with key variations of your brand and the names of your products that use them in applicable markets will make it possible to do some protection against cybersquatting, impersonation, and unauthorized use.
The documented brand protection policy should also detail roles, responsibilities, escalation routes and authorized enforcement actions. Engaging security, marketing, legal and fraud teams will help you balance decisions about brand protection security against the customer experience vs. legal risk and operational capacity.
Track your domain, website and infrastructure
Proactive domain management is considered best practice for any brand protection offering. Organizations need to follow newly-registered domains that are similar to their own, such as typosquats, homoglyphs, misuse of product or executive names and other things like it.
Automated web crawlers can look for phishing pages, fake login portals, copycat sites and scam landing pages repurposing content or design. Incorporating this into takedown workflows enables teams to rapidly stop phishing and fraud attacks before they take off.
Prevent a brand from falling out on the social and marketplaces
Attackers are progressively using social media and e-commerce networks to impersonate brands, execs and support staffs. Good practice would be to constantly monitor mainstream platforms for fake accounts, fraudulent ads, spoofed support profiles and posts that push victims to various phishing sites.
Marketplaces and app stores must also watch out for counterfeit products, unauthorized resellers, cloned apps, and abuse of brand assets in listings. Robust brand protection strategies integrate automated detection of abusive profiles, posts and listing contents with playbooks for reporting and removal.
Apply digital brand protection into the dark web
Several of the most effective brand threats, including credential leaks, customer data dumps, and internal access sales originate in dark web forums and marketplaces. Tracking these channels can detect long before campaigns hit your customers when attackers are trading on your brand name, domains or data.
Dark web monitoring tools and cyber threat intelligence platforms can scan marketplaces, forums and closed channels as the attackers look for mentions of your brand, executives or main assets on target. When combined with internal telemetry and takedown capabilities, these feeds enable teams to neutralize infrastructure and reset exposed credentials on the fly.
Scale detection and response by automation and AI
With the sheer volume of digital channels, just manual monitoring is insufficient for modern security with your brand. AI and machine learning-powered brand protection solutions can identify lookalike domains, cloned sites, and impersonation styles at scale while filtering out the noise.
Best-of-breed platforms offer immediate alerts, risk scoring, and automated back-end tasks for takedowns, blocking and case management. It allows security teams to concentrate on high-threat threats, cutting out repetitive search and reporting requests.
Combine brand protection and security strategy
Digital brand protection should not be in isolation. Having brand protection data at SIEM, SOAR and threat intelligence platforms also allows for the correlations of external brand abuse and internal security events, like phishing clicks or credential stuffing.
Joint playbooks between security, fraud and marketing can work across teams around technical blocking (like URL filtering or email security), legal action, and customer communication in case there is a brand-related incident. Through an integrated process, such a response will ensure both an immediate decrease in losses from fraud and a reduction in long-term damage to reputations.
Educate employees and customers
Regular employee training sessions should focus on how attackers abuse brands through phishing, social engineering, fake support and supplier impersonation, along with how to report suspected brand abuse. Customer-facing education need to include areas such as official domains, verified support channels, and identifying scams that misuse brands. With accurate and consistent messaging, impersonation attacks will become less successful while brand trust grows.
Always fine-tune brand protection strategies
Brand threats are always evolving, from AI deepfake voices, to phishing lures, to domain abuse attacks. Routine monitoring of coverage, detection rules, and enforcement keeps digital brand protection programs up to date with attackers. Measures, such as time to detection, time to takedown, number of incidents averted, and customer impact will determine how much investment is needed in tools, staffing and new workflows.
