Brand Centric External Attack Surface Management
Brand-centric External Attack Surface Management (EASM) is a cybersecurity discipline that focuses on identifying, analyzing, and mitigating digital risks outside an organization's perimeter and directly tied to its brand, reputation, trademarks, and consumer trust. Unlike traditional EASM, which often focuses on infrastructure assets like servers and IP addresses, the brand-centric approach prioritizes the risks faced by customers and the public that can lead to financial loss, legal liability, or reputational damage for the company.
Core Focus Areas
The practice centers on monitoring the "digital environment of the brand" to identify vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit to trick, defraud, or defame the organization. Key areas of focus include:
1. Digital Impersonation and Typosquatting
This involves continuously scanning the internet for malicious entities that exploit the brand's likeness.
Domain Permutations: Proactively monitoring variations of the organization's official domains, trademarks, and key product names across all Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to detect and preemptively register or seek the takedown of cybersquatting and typosquatting domains (e.g., domains with common spelling mistakes or subtle character substitutions).
Decentralized Naming: Identifying brand-impersonating names registered on blockchain domain services (like .eth or .crypto), which pose significant enforcement challenges due to their immutable and anonymous nature.
2. Customer-Targeted Phishing Infrastructure
The goal is to detect and neutralize the infrastructure used to defraud customers and employees.
Lookalike Websites: Finding websites designed to mimic the organization’s login portals or e-commerce storefronts to steal credentials or payment information.
Mail Records: Identifying whether detected permutation domains have active Mail Exchange (MX) records, indicating the domain is being actively prepared or used for Business Email Compromise (BEC) or spear-phishing campaigns.
3. Brand-Related Data Leaks and Exposures
This focuses on data exposure that damages trust and creates a public relations crisis.
Dark Web Monitoring: Continuously monitoring criminal forums and marketplaces for mentions of the brand, internal project names, executive emails, and specific dumps of compromised customer or employee credentials.
Sensitive Public Disclosure: Searching public repositories and code-sharing platforms for accidental exposure of intellectual property, proprietary application code, or hard-coded secrets that competitors or criminals can exploit.
Strategic Value
Brand-centric EASM shifts the risk conversation at the executive and board levels from "Are our servers secure?" to "Is our brand safe and is our customer base protected?" By focusing on external, qualitative factors such as reputation, trust, and legal risk, it provides the essential intelligence needed to manage high-impact, non-technical threats that often lead to regulatory action or investor losses.
ThreatNG's capabilities are specifically designed to execute and provide intelligence for a Brand-centric External Attack Surface Management (EASM) strategy by focusing on external, non-infrastructure risks that directly impact brand reputation and customer trust.
Executing Brand-Centric EASM with ThreatNG
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to map an organization's digital footprint, including all brand-related assets. Through continuous monitoring, it ensures the brand's perimeter is constantly monitored for emerging threats such as typosquatting or data leaks.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring immediately detects the registration of a new domain, mycompany-signup.com, via its discovery process, flagging an immediate risk of brand-targeted fraud before an attacker can launch a phishing campaign using that asset. This proactive identification is key to brand defense.
External Assessment (Security Ratings)
ThreatNG's security ratings quantify the risks that matter most to brand-centric EASM: impersonation, financial fraud, and reputational damage.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating directly addresses brand-related fraud by assessing the risk of impersonation.
Detailed Example: The rating is based on Domain Name Permutations (available and taken) and the presence of Domain Permutations with Mail Record. Suppose ThreatNG finds a taken permutation, such as mycompany-auth.com. In that case, it has an active mail server, the low security rating signals a high, quantified risk that the brand is being used to conduct a phishing campaign aimed at stealing user credentials.
Brand Damage Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating directly measures reputational risk.
Detailed Example: The rating is based on findings across Domain Name Permutations, Negative News, and ESG Violations. The presence of a registered permutation incorporating Critical Language (e.g., a domain related to "awful" or "bad") or Action Calls (e.g., a "boycott" domain) contributes to a low rating, providing the board with a measurable metric for external reputational threats.
Investigation Modules
The investigation modules allow security teams to gather the specific, non-infrastructure context needed to understand and mitigate brand abuse.
Domain Intelligence (Domain Name Permutations): This module systematically generates and analyzes variations across a vast list of TLDs and common manipulations.
Detailed Example: An analyst can use this module to search for homoglyphs or bitsquatting versions of their brand name across a wide range of TLDs, including Major Global Economies (.cn, .in) and New gTLDs (.tech, .bank). If a malicious actor registers a domain that uses a character substitution (like 'O' for '0') and points it at an IP address, the module confirms the existence of the impersonation infrastructure.
Social Media Investigation Module: This module proactively safeguards the organization by identifying the Conversational Attack Surface and the Human Attack Surface.
Detailed Example: Reddit Discovery transforms public chatter into an early warning system for Narrative Risk. If a thread discussing a "security flaw" in the brand's product is found, this information helps the brand proactively manage the public narrative before it escalates into a crisis. Similarly, LinkedIn Discovery identifies employees susceptible to social engineering attacks.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module identifies an organization's presence on online code-sharing platforms such as Pastebin and GitHub Gist.
Detailed Example: A developer might accidentally paste proprietary application code into Pastebin. The module detects this, confirming the exposure of intellectual property (a core brand asset) and enabling the team to issue a takedown request before competitors weaponize the code.
Intelligence Repositories
The DarCache repositories provide the necessary off-platform context for brand risk.
DarCache Dark Web: This repository tracks mentions of the organization, related people, places, or things, and associated Compromised Credentials.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: By monitoring the Dark Web for the brand name, ThreatNG identifies that an entire customer database containing names and emails is being offered for sale, providing immediate evidence of a material breach that impacts customer trust and reputation.
DarCache ESG: This repository tracks ESG Violations across categories such as Consumer, Competition, and Safety. This intelligence feeds the Brand Damage Susceptibility rating, quantifying reputational and legal risk.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s brand-centric intelligence is essential for working cooperatively with services that execute legal or technical takedown responses.
Digital Risk Protection (DRP) and Brand Enforcement Services: ThreatNG identifies and prioritizes the malicious domains, and DRP services execute the necessary legal or technical steps.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG’s BEC & Phishing Susceptibility findings flag a new typosquatting domain, mycornpany.com, as being actively used for phishing (it has an MX record). ThreatNG shares this specific, high-confidence domain and evidence with a brand enforcement service. The enforcement service then automatically initiates a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) filing or domain registrar complaint, accelerating the removal of the threat that impacts customer trust.
Security Awareness Training Platforms: ThreatNG identifies the exact nature of the phishing threat, which can be used to train employees.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG’s Domain Intelligence reveals the prevalence of phishing domains impersonating the company's login page (e.g., mycompany-portal.com). This specific threat intelligence is fed into the organization’s security awareness training platform, which then customizes the phishing simulations and employee education to specifically focus on the identified lookalike domains, improving the human element of brand defense.
