Brand Misuse Monitoring is a vital cybersecurity use case that involves the continuous, proactive surveillance of the entire external digital landscape (surface web, social media, mobile app stores, dark web) to detect and manage unauthorized or fraudulent use of an organization's brand assets. It is a core component of Digital Risk Protection (DRP).

The primary goal is to identify and take action against any form of digital abuse, including brand impersonation, intellectual property infringement, and the spread of misinformation, that could lead to consumer fraud, reputational harm, or financial loss.

How ThreatNG Helps with Brand Misuse Monitoring

ThreatNG, as an External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection solution, provides the outside-in perspective and specialized investigation modules needed to track and neutralize brand misuse across the internet.

External Discovery

ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, allowing it to find assets and references that are often invisible to internal tools.

• Example: It proactively discovers thousands of potential subdomains related to the brand that may be hosting unauthorized content or forgotten web pages that could be taken over and used for phishing or fraudulent promotions, thereby misusing the brand's identity.

External Assessment

ThreatNG's external assessments directly measure the brand's vulnerability to various forms of misuse:

• Brand Damage Susceptibility: This score is derived from digital risk intelligence, including Sentiment and Financials (such as Negative News or Lawsuits) and Domain Intelligence.

  • Example: If ThreatNG detects a high volume of negative chatter or a recent SEC Filing related to a customer data incident, the score is raised. This context alerts the team that the brand is a prime target for misuse—such as coordinated social media attacks or defamation campaigns—and requires increased monitoring.

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment helps prioritize threats where the brand is being used to conduct financial fraud.

  • Example: It checks the brand's primary domain for weak Email Intelligence (e.g., missing DMARC records), which means any attacker can easily spoof the company's email address and commit Business Email Compromise (BEC), a severe form of brand misuse.

Reporting

ThreatNG provides focused, prioritized reports that transform raw discovery data into actionable security insights for Brand Misuse Monitoring.

• Prioritized Report: This report ensures that threats with the highest potential for brand damage are addressed first. For instance, the discovery of a fake mobile app using the company's logo that is currently ranked high in a major app store would be flagged as a Critical risk, prompting immediate enforcement action.

Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG performs continuous monitoring of the external attack surface and digital risk. Brand misuse, such as a typosquatted domain being registered or a fake social media profile being created, happens instantly; continuous monitoring ensures a real-time defense.

• Example: It constantly scans domain registries for variations of the brand name (e.g., adding a hyphen, swapping a letter) and provides a near real-time alert when a malicious domain is registered, enabling the legal team to begin takedown procedures before the domain is used for a phishing attack.

Investigation Modules

These modules provide the detailed evidence necessary to validate and act on brand misuse incidents.

• Social Media: This module safeguards the brand by monitoring for impersonation and narrative risk.

  • Example: It identifies and tracks fake accounts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram that use the brand’s logo or executive names to solicit money or spread misinformation. Reddit Discovery can find forums where threat actors are discussing or planning a coordinated campaign of brand abuse.

• Domain Intelligence: This module is critical for detecting fraudulent website infrastructure.

  • Example: It uses Domain Name Permutations to find every possible look-alike domain (e.g., homoglyphs that look like the brand name). For any suspicious domain, DNS Intelligence provides the associated IP address and WHOIS registration details, which are the essential data points for sending a takedown request.

• Mobile Application Discovery: This feature scans official and third-party app marketplaces.

  • Example: It detects unauthorized apps that use the brand’s name and logo. Furthermore, it scans the app's contents for exposed information like Access Credentials or Security Credentials (e.g., an exposed Stripe API Key), confirming the app is both fraudulent and dangerous.

Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)

ThreatNG’s repositories provide the deep, dark web context of brand misuse.

• Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web): This provides insight into where attackers might be selling counterfeit products using the brand's trademarks or discussing plans to launch brand abuse campaigns.

• Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): A database of leaked accounts. The discovery of Associated Compromised Credentials enables the organization to prevent a specific form of brand misuse, where an attacker impersonates a particular employee to conduct fraud.

Working with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's external threat intelligence can be used with complementary solutions to automate the enforcement and response actions against brand misuse.

• Brand Protection and Takedown Services: ThreatNG's Domain Intelligence module identifies a severe case of typosquatting (e.g., company-login-support.com) and validates it with a high-risk score. This actionable intelligence, including the fraudulent URL, IP address, and hosting provider, is automatically fed to a complementary Brand Protection/Takedown Service. This cooperation enables the complementary solution to instantly generate and send a validated cease-and-desist letter or takedown request to the hosting provider, ensuring the malicious site is removed within hours, not days.

• Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: ThreatNG's Social Media monitoring detects a rapidly growing fake social media account that is actively scamming customers. A complementary SOAR platform automatically ingests this high-priority alert. The SOAR platform's playbook automatically initiates a response: it alerts the organization's legal and communications teams, auto-populates a platform abuse report with all the evidence gathered by ThreatNG (screenshots, account handle, URL), and publishes a pre-approved warning message on the company's official channels to notify customers about the scam.