Brand protection solutions are designed to safeguard your brand from various threats including counterfeiting, piracy, and other forms of intellectual property infringement. These software platforms employ numerous techniques, from digital watermarking to domain monitoring, thereby ensuring that your brand remains untarnished and that your customers are safe from fraudulent products or services. There are many reasons to invest in brand protection solutions: they help businesses ensure their product quality, maintain customer trust, avoid loss of revenue from counterfeiters, and protect their reputation from negative consumer experiences associated with fake products.
Brand protection providers oversee an array of areas to keep your brand safe. They monitor for infringements on trademark rights and patents, scrutinize online marketplaces, track social media accounts, and assess domain names. When an infringement is identified, they can take appropriate response actions on your behalf, such as cease and desist notices or legal action.
For business owners, brand protection means ensuring that your customers interact with your genuine products and services, rather than counterfeit or pirated versions. This not only safeguards your revenue, but also maintains trust and confidence in your brand. On the administrative side, brand protection solutions deliver comprehensive overviews of your brand’s digital footprint, alerting you to potential risks and infringements so you can take immediate action.
The brand protection market offers various tools and platforms, each one tailored to address unique aspects of brand safety. They are usually coupled with robust trademark management systems and digital rights management platforms to support enforcement of intellectual property rights. This article will highlight the top brand protection solutions and breakdown their key capabilities. We’ll assess their features, such as marketplace monitoring, authentication, reporting, and incident response, drawing from our own testing experiences and user feedback.
Bolster is a leading provider of automated brand protection software. This platform protects your business’s trademarks and data from a wide array of digital threats including phishing attacks and brand impersonation.
The company leverages artificial intelligence to identify and halt digital brand frauds, providing you with access to a large amount of threat data. Bolster’s software monitors typosquat variants across all TLDs in real time and checks Google and Bing results for the presence of phishing sites and falsified outcomes. It also assesses context when scanning for logo and brand usage, thereby providing comprehensive protection for your digital presence.
Bolster’s technology doesn’t just detect fraudulent activity, but proactively addresses the issue. In each case, it follows a process that aligns with each customer’s specific needs. It offers robust brand protection that scans for threats across web domains, social media platforms, app stores, and even the dark web. This ensures no threat goes undetected, helping maintain your company’s reputation.
Additionally, the tool includes a rich threat intelligence dashboard, enabling customers to access and customize reports, phishing and fraud data points, and instances of logo misuse. Bolster’s brand protection service combines efficient fraud detection with automated takedown capabilities resulting in swift and effective response to threats. The use of AI and continuous monitoring across the threat lifecycle ensures this protection is not just reactive, but also preventive.
BrandShield is a brand protection solution dedicated to detecting and eliminating online fraud activity such as phishing, brand misuse, trademark infringement, and counterfeit sales. The software’s advanced technology ensures a thorough internet scan to identify potential threats. Removing these risks is handled by BrandShield’s team of takedown professionals with extensive expertise in the field.
BrandShield is designed to protect against financial losses and reputational damage caused by counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers. This improves the visibility of legitimate products by eliminating these rogue listings. This, in turn, can potentially enhance the return on investment for your company. It also helps maintain customer trust by reducing the risk of falling victim to scams that tarnish your brand’s reputation. Additionally, the platform can help protect your company from legal liability arising from lack of consumer safety and counterfeit-related issues.
BrandShield’s detection capabilities extend to a range of internet platforms, including websites, social media, online marketplaces, PPC ads, and mobile apps. Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, it empowers users to prioritize and address the most harmful violations and large-scale abuse networks with assistance from their team of experts.
What sets BrandShield apart is the amalgamation of advanced technology and skilled threat hunters delivered in a user-friendly SaaS package. It offers full and proactive coverage across various channels including websites, domain names, social media, and online marketplaces. The AI-powered technology incorporates logo and product recognition, natural language processing, and domain monitoring to identify counterfeits or brand abuse. Additionally, BrandShield’s platform offers complete case management, full transparency, and easy setup, requiring no local installation or additional integration.
BrandVerity is a service specializing in Paid Search Monitoring and Web Compliance. The platform enables businesses to optimize their Click Through Rates (CTRs) and decrease their Cost-Per-Click (CPC) by identifying and eliminating harmful ads on important branded keywords. It also offers protection against affiliate channel abuse by detecting and removing unauthorized ads.
BrandVerity’s Web Compliance feature automatically oversees the online marketing activities of a company’s partners and affiliates. This function helps to safeguard a business from damaging brand violations and potential regulatory risks.
Through constant analysis of thousands of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) across varying geographical locations, BrandVerity offers a comprehensive review of brand violations and delivers actionable reports. Users can swiftly respond to these reports through inbuilt features such as bulk takedown requests for search engines and pre-filled email templates for non-compliant partners.
Additionally, BrandVerity offers Managed Services designed to support paid search or compliance teams. This service includes resources such as trademark infringement identification and reporting as well as partner violation management.
Fortra PhishLabs is a digital brand protection service that assists businesses in counteracting and manage online brand abuse. Their service focuses on defending brands that risk abuse on the web, social media, and digital adverts. They aim to neutralize the risk posed by look-alike domains, counterfeit ads, and false social profiles, which can lead to fraud and security incidents.
To provide a comprehensive service, Fortra PhishLabs constantly collects data from the surface web, deep web, dark web, and social media to identify potential threats. This includes any content that contains brand keywords or variations of these terms. Their strategy involves extensively automated data collection integrated with expert mining techniques, providing a broad view of potential brand threats across all digital channels.
PhishLabs utilizes machine-filtering technology and expert analysts to categorize and prioritize relevant brand references, eliminating the noise and focusing on impactful threats. Using Fortra PhishLab’s services enables businesses to streamline resources and concentrate on specific threats to their brand image.
Fortra PhishLabs further enhances their service by aiding in the takedown of brand abuse instances. Their analysts work meticulously to gather evidence of brand abuse, thus navigating the complexities of online threat takedowns. Their 15 years of service have enabled the establishment of a network of partnerships with leading registrars and social platforms, ensuring effective and swift takedowns where needed.
Recorded Future’s Brand Intelligence is designed to defend organizations from external risks to their brand. It delivers real-time brand alerts on external cybersecurity threats, enabling swift mitigation. These alerts include detailed context such as screenshots, logo detection, DNS record analysis, WHOIS, and certificate data examination to boost the speed and confidence of the response.
This solution can detect and minimize impact from multiple forms of brand attacks orchestrated outside of an organization’s security perimeter. These include typosquat websites, data leakage, and brand impersonations. The tool allows meticulous brand exposure reporting, up-to-the-minute risk views related to the industry, ransomware dashboard, and easy integrations via an API.
Brand Intelligence also offers real-time translation of global brand mentions in various languages and provides visuals of typosquat websites. This facilitates tracking and analyzing global threats with comprehensive visibility. Brand Intelligence also features a portfolio of over 40 use cases, encompassing company, executive, and brand impersonations, logo and domain misuse, data and credential leaks, and dark web mentions among others, all accompanied by real-time alerts and action plans. With these features, Brand Intelligence aims to equip organizations with actionable insights to proactively defend their brand against emerging threats.
Red Points operates as an industry-respected brand protection software, used commonly for tracking and eliminating counterfeit listings and sellers. Assisting trademark and copyright holders, this software acts as a line of defense for digital assets against unauthorized operators, preventing potential revenue loss and protecting the client’s brand reputation.
The service targets a broad spectrum of infringements including trademark violation, counterfeit products, and spoofing. By using advanced brand protection tools, Red Points can automatically detect and process thousands of intellectual property infringements, prioritizing the most harmful cases first. This includes automatic internet crawling carried out through bot-powered search and advanced image recognition. The platform also delivers efficient violation validation 24/7 and enrichment by machine learning algorithms that incorporate patterns and keyword opportunities.
Red Point’s brand protection process is robust yet straightforward. Its automated systems detect potential infringements through text and image searches. These findings are then validated using image recognition and logic rules, with each confirmed counterfeit subjected to an automatic takedown request from the brand protection tool. This ensures brands are protected 24/7.
With extensive coverage across multiple platforms and domains, Red Points boasts industry-leading expertise in brand safety. Over 1,300 brands have chosen Red Points for its transparent ROI, wide-reaching solutions, and the team’s ability to tackle even the most sophisticated of challenges.
ZeroFox is a leading provider of brand protection software. The company offers comprehensive solutions designed to guard businesses and customers from online fraud, imitation, and attacks, thus preserving the integrity of the brand’s digital presence. In an era where customers entrust organizations with their data and personal information, ZeroFox’s software safeguards businesses against potential threats such as account takeover, fake accounts, phony domains, and scams that exploit branding to deceive customers.
ZeroFox’s software provides holistic brand coverage, extending protection to all areas of an organization’s digital presence, including customer interaction, reputation management, and business transactions. The service is scalable, ensuring that all customer engagements are with genuine accounts and adverts on a global level. Efficiency is also key with artificial intelligence-based analysis, automated content takedowns and user-friendly policies, all contributing to a faster resolution time.
Some of the key features of ZeroFox’s software include domain monitoring, which provides continuous identification and remediation of impersonating domains, trademark infringement, spoofing, and account takeover protection that alerts users to suspicious account behavior.
The software also provides automated takedown and disruption actions. It delivers comprehensive intelligence collection, data analysis, alerting to possible brand abuse, and automated takedowns. This, ultimately, safeguards the brand reputation and customer engagement online.
Brand protection solutions are designed to monitor and respond to any instances where your brand name or image is being misused. There are many reasons why websites might be using your name or logo – perhaps it is a review site, and customers have left their feedback on your service. If, however, your brand is being harnessed for malicious purposes, it should be stopped. Brand protection solutions cover this entire lifecycle – from identification to removal and remediation.
Attackers may attempt to harness your company name, brand image, and iconography to socially engineer users into committing acts that endanger them. While this type of attack does not directly involve you – your organization is not the target or the victim of the attack – you are an invested party. If you do not respond to attacks that utilise your brand, customers may become wary and distrustful of your communication. They may perceive legitimate communication from you as fraudulent. Your image may be tarnished through malicious actors using your brand.
Brand protection solutions work by combining human expertise with security technology to identify instances where your brand is being used in attacks. They can then automatically report fraudulent instances where your brand is being misused, or send cease and desist notices, initiating legal action.
In order to protect your brand and to prevent anyone from falling victim to an attack involving your branding, brand protection solutions work in three key ways:
1. Continuous Monitoring
To properly protect a brand, the web must be monitored continuously to identify any fraudulent instances as soon as they appear. If you are able to discover the attack attempt as soon as it goes live, you decrease the number of innocent users who are able to see the misused content.
2. Risk Identification
Part of the job of a brand protection solution is to understand the nature of each threat. It is all very well identifying branding that is not hosted on your own website, but that does not necessarily mean it’s dangerous. You may want your brand advertised on reputable review pages, and not want this taken down.
Brand protection solutions will understand what the attack is, how it is working, and what the risks of it are. This makes it much easier to respond to and allows you to respond to anyone who may have fallen victim already.
3. Attack Mitigation
Brand protection solutions are designed to identify instances of misuse, then gather evidence that can lead to these fraudulent listings being removed. In some cases, this will involve liaising with internet service providers, in other cases it will be achieved by sending formal cease and desist notices to the offending parties.
To find the right platform for your organization, it is worth considering the risks that you are susceptible to. For example, if your organization has an extensive public profile with recognizable branding, you may be susceptible to brand impersonation and spoofed sites. If you are a manufacturer, you may need a platform that can identify instances where your products have been imitated and trademarks breached. Once you know what you need to defend against, you’ll be in a better position to defend against these threats.
In this section, we’ll highlight some other key features to consider when selecting a brand protection solution.
Typosquatting is a form of cyberattack where a malicious actor uses a domain address that closely resembles a legitimate one. They rely on users mistyping URLs without realizing. Once a user ends up on a fake URL, the site will attempt to trick them into imputing sensitive details.
Alex is an experienced journalist and content editor. He researches, writes, factchecks and edits articles relating to B2B cyber security and technology solutions, working alongside software experts. Alex was awarded a First Class MA (Hons) in English and Scottish Literature by the University of Edinburgh.
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.