Brand and Phishing Defense
In cybersecurity, Brand and Phishing Defense refers to a comprehensive strategy and set of technologies used to protect an organization, its employees, and its customers from attacks that leverage a brand's identity. These defenses are designed to prevent malicious actors from impersonating a brand to steal sensitive information, distribute malware, or commit fraud.
Key Aspects of Brand and Phishing Defense
An effective brand and phishing defense strategy is proactive and multi-layered, covering various potential attack vectors.
Proactive Monitoring: This involves continuously scanning the internet for threats before they can cause damage. This includes monitoring for:
Domain Name Permutations: Identifying fraudulent domain names that are similar to the legitimate brand's name (e.g., typosquatting, homoglyphs).
Impersonating Social Media Profiles: Detecting fake social media accounts that mimic a brand's official presence to deceive followers.
Dark Web Mentions: Tracking discussions on the dark web and other underground forums for signs of planned phishing campaigns targeting the brand.
Email Security: Since email is a primary vector for phishing, robust defenses are critical. This includes:
Spoofing Protection: Implementing protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) to prevent attackers from sending emails that appear to be from the legitimate brand.
Content Filtering: Using advanced filters to scan for malicious links, attachments, and suspicious language in emails.
Website and Content Protection: This involves protecting the brand's digital assets and ensuring that customers are directed to the correct, secure website.
SSL/TLS Certificates: Using valid and up-to-date SSL/TLS certificates to encrypt traffic and assure users that they are on a secure site.
Website Takedown Services: Working with service providers to quickly identify and take down fraudulent websites that impersonate the brand.
User Education: A crucial, non-technical component is training employees and customers to recognize and report phishing attempts. This helps to create a "human firewall" that can identify attacks that bypass technical controls.
Why It Is Essential
Brand and phishing defense is not just about protecting data; it's about safeguarding a company's reputation and financial stability. A successful phishing attack can lead to:
Loss of Customer Trust: Customers who fall victim to a scam will often lose trust in the brand.
Financial and Reputational Damage: The costs of a data breach, including legal fees, regulatory fines, and reputational harm, can be substantial.
Malware and Ransomware Infections: Phishing emails are a common way to deliver malware, which can cripple an organization's operations.
ThreatNG helps with Brand and Phishing Defense by performing a continuous, unauthenticated, outside-in discovery and assessment of an organization's attack surface to identify and mitigate threats that use brand impersonation.
ThreatNG's Capabilities for Brand and Phishing Defense
ThreatNG's ability to address brand and phishing defense is embedded throughout its solution, from discovery to investigation and reporting.
External Discovery and Assessment
ThreatNG performs an external, unauthenticated discovery to find and analyze assets from an attacker's perspective. This includes identifying digital risks that can be used for brand impersonation.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: The platform calculates this score based on various factors, including Domain Intelligence. This capability includes explicitly identifying Domain Name Permutations and Web3 domains that are available and taken, which are common tactics for phishing and BEC attacks. For example, ThreatNG would detect a domain like micr0soft-login.com and factor it into this susceptibility score.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses this risk by analyzing attack surface and digital risk intelligence, with a key component being Domain Intelligence. This module identifies domain name permutations and Web3 domains that could be used for brand impersonation and to cause brand damage. An example would be the discovery of a domain like c0mpany-sucks.com or company-boycott.com.
Data Leak Susceptibility: The platform's assessment of data leak susceptibility also uses Domain Intelligence, including its ability to find domain name permutations. This helps uncover malicious domains that could be used to host fake websites designed to steal credentials and facilitate data leaks.
The Domain Intelligence investigation module is the primary tool for brand and phishing defense. Within its DNS Intelligence capabilities, ThreatNG enables the detection and grouping of various domain manipulations and additions commonly used in phishing campaigns.
Domain Name Permutations: This feature is specifically designed to find manipulations such as substitutions, additions, bitsquatting, hyphenations, insertions, omissions, repetition, replacement, subdomains, transpositions, vowel-swaps, dictionary additions, TLD-swaps, and homoglyphs. It also provides the associated mail records and IP addresses to help detect brand impersonation. For instance, it can detect homoglyph attacks using Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) with visually similar characters.
Targeted Keyword Analysis: ThreatNG takes the discovered domain name permutations and searches for the presence of "Authentication" terms like login, verify, and admin, as well as "Derogatory" terms like sucks, awful, and boycott. This helps pinpoint domains created for specific malicious purposes, such as hosting a fake login page or a brand-damaging site.
Email Intelligence: The Email Intelligence module identifies an organization's email security presence, including DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records. This is critical for brand defense as these protocols help prevent attackers from spoofing a brand's email domain to send phishing emails.
Archived Web Pages: This module helps with phishing defense by showing what has been archived on an organization's online presence, including login pages, API files, and other documents. This can reveal assets that might be a target for attackers.
Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG provides comprehensive reports, including Executive, Technical, and Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational), which would highlight any brand impersonation or phishing threats discovered. This allows organizations to allocate resources and prioritize their security efforts based on risk levels. The platform's continuous monitoring capability ensures that the external attack surface is constantly tracked, and new threats are identified as they appear.
ThreatNG's DarCache Dark Web intelligence repository tracks mentions of an organization on the dark web. This can provide early warnings of a brand being targeted in a phishing campaign or other malicious activities, allowing for proactive defense.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's brand and phishing defense capabilities can be enhanced by working with other security solutions.
ThreatNG and an Email Security Gateway: ThreatNG could identify a new domain name permutation, such as legitcompany-support.com, that has active mail records. This intelligence could be provided to an email security gateway, which could then block any emails originating from this malicious domain, preventing a phishing campaign from reaching employees.
ThreatNG and a DNS Firewall: If ThreatNG discovers a typosquatted domain like companynamee.com and its associated IP address, this information could be used to update a DNS firewall. The firewall would then block all network requests to this fraudulent IP address, preventing employees and customers from accidentally visiting the phishing site.
ThreatNG and a Website Takedown Service: After ThreatNG identifies a fraudulent website that is impersonating a brand, the information about the malicious domain and its hosting provider could be shared with a website takedown service. This would enable the service to act quickly and have the fake site removed, minimizing the window of opportunity for attackers.
