Everything You Need To Know About Brand Protection Solutions (FAQs)
What Are Brand Protection Solutions?
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.
How do Brand Protection Solutions Work?
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.
What Features Should You Look For In Brand Protection Solutions?
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.
- Trademark Monitoring – this should cover online marketplaces, social media, websites, and offline sources
- Counterfeit Detection – image recognition and AI can be used to identify cases where competitors are ripping off your products
- Social Media Monitoring – by scanning social media, you can identify sellers and victims of band impersonated products
- Automated Resolution – depending on the size of your organization, there could well be thousands of instances where your brand is misused – automated resolution makes responding to this much more achievable
- Legal Enforcement – where you cannot simply address a fraudulent site, your platform should have capacity to instigate legal proceedings against the offending site
What Is A Typosquat?
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.