BrandPointProtection

(Brand Protection from Internet threats)

BrandPointProtection service guarantees the safety of your brand on the Internet.

Problem

The ever-increasing importance of the Internet to modern corporations has resulted in the rise of a novel cyber threat: targeted attack on a company’s reputation or brand. Prime examples of such threats are mass junk e-mailing (spam), the release of private or confidential data on the Internet, the growth of counterfeit or fraudulent web sites (phishing, cybersquatting, etc.), illicit use of a corporate brand, and reputation attacks (black PR). Criminals use such methods to harvest data about the clients of well-known companies, sell counterfeit goods, engage in fraudulent activity and interfere with a company’s legal conduct of its business. Financial losses due to reputation attacks are very real, as are the risks to a company’s good name. While more intangible, the latter risk may ultimately exceed the threat of short-term financial loss.

Internet threats to corporate brands bear a great number of concealed risks apart from direct financial loss and damage to a company’s reputation. These risks go beyond the boundaries strictly of IT and lie at the intersection of information security, marketing and public relations. It should be noted that the situation is complicated by the fact that the Internet is an unlimited, uncontrolled activity zone where there are no uniform rules, laws and security services. To efficiently detect and neutralize these threats it is necessary to coordinate a complex array of technical, human and legal knowledge while at the same time navigating the legislative intricacies of the Russian Federation and other countries.

Solution

To assure complete, ongoing brand protection against cyber threats, it is essential to constantly monitor the Internet, including sites that are closed or hidden. It is necessary to monitor for brand misuse, to detect fraudulent and phishing sites, and to forestall reputation attacks based on black PR techniques. Threat sources need to be identified and neutralized: illegal content must be found and removed, phishing or informal web sites need to be taken down and the criminals behind these attacks must be brought to justice.

BrandPointProtection, a unique offering by Group-IB, is a set of services that provides day-and-night monitoring, notification and response to cases of brand misuse on the Internet and any other threats causing reputation harm or financial loss to your organization.

BrandPointProtection is:

Proactive monitoring:

  • Monitoring of e-Media, blogs, social networks, online forums and other Internet venues in order to detect distorted information or dirty tricks campaigns against your corporate identity.
  • Monitoring of closed hacker resources in order to detect existing and new requests for services connected with threats to your brand security.
  • Monitoring of search engine requests: besides ordinary text requests, images related to your brand and services are monitored via specialized search engine queries. Image searches go beyond just exact matching with static resource content (web-sites, products, logos etc.).
  • Monitoring of domain names that sound the same or are similar in writing to your corporate name, to counteract cybersquatting.
  • Monitoring the content of web sites with domain names that sound similar to a brand name in order to detect phishing sites.
  • Monitoring of undesirable email (spam) mentioning a brand in order to identify phishing sites and resources intended to harm a client’s reputation.
  • Preventive data acquisition from international anti-phishing bases (AntiPhishing.org, FraudWatchInternational.com, OPERA, MS InternetExplorer, ESET).
  • Updating of international anti-phishing database filters (AntiPhishing.org, ESET, FraudWatchInternational.com, MarkMonitor).
  • Monitoring the illegal publication of your company’s confidential information.

Immediate notification of:

  • Identification of phishing, the appearance of fraudulent or informal sites, and the publication of confidential information.
  • Detection of spam in which the brand or other keywords are mentioned.
  • Reputation attacks and fraudulent or illegal activity in social networks, and other Internet-based communication media.
  • Detection of malicious software targeting the brand or its use.

Response and investigation:

  • Brand misuse, black PR:
    • Deletion or replacement of web site content that undermines the brand reputation.
    • Removal of a company’s confidential information from web sites to which it has illegally been posted.
    • Closure of web resources that illicitly undermine brand awareness or cause its search engine index to fall. Removal of domain name delegation is carried out in accordance with ICANN international rules.
    • Blocking of hosting where a website undermining the brand reputation is located. Hosting blocking is performed according to international rules and local regulations of the states where the resource is located. Communication and notification of illegal activity is made to law enforcement agencies in the appropriate territorial jurisdiction.
    • Identification of the source of negative publications or attacks.
    • Identifying and bringing to justice persons responsible for the engineering of black PR campaigns against the brand, company or individual employees.
  • Phishing, fraudulent or unofficial sites:
    • Closure of web sites with similar-sounding names and, when possible, the transfer of the domain name to your company.
    • Identifying and bringing to justice individuals accessory to the development of such resources.
  • Malicious software:
    • Notification of your company’s experts upon the emergence of malicious software targeted at the theft of personal information, credit card data, logins and passwords of payment systems and other confidential information, including a summary of how to detect symptoms of computer infection.
    • Addition of malicious software to the signature databases of antivirus software vendors.
    • Identification of criminals who distribute this malicious code in order to bring them to justice under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
  • Social networks:
    • Blocking the activity of illegal groups, questionnaires, blogs and forums that claim to represent your company.
    • Bringing to justice the persons behind these groups, questionnaires, blogs and forums.
  • Spam:
    • Termination of illicit bulk email.
    • Bringing to justice persons accessory to such bulk email.

Expert analysis of acquired information:

  • Conducting research aimed at a better understanding of threats to your corporate brand and reputation on the Internet.
  • Providing statistical data related to the most common threats to a brand and to your company’s reputation on the Internet.
  • Identification and development of event search and filtering criteria.
  • Characterizing the relative importance of events.
  • Development of event classification procedures.
  • Event correlation:  a pattern of events isolated from different sources is correlated to a single incident.
  • Analysis of web site “clones” and phishing sites with the potential to harm your company’s brand and reputation.