Brand Impersonation Exposure
Brand-Impersonation Exposure, in the context of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), refers to the risk an organization faces when external entities fraudulently use its brand identity for malicious purposes.
It is a key external exposure within the Digital Risk Protection (DRP) domain of CTEM.
The purpose of tracking this exposure within a CTEM program is to identify and prioritize the immediate and potential harm these attacks pose to an organization's revenue, customer trust, and public reputation. Unlike traditional system vulnerabilities, brand-impersonation attacks exploit human trust rather than technical flaws.
Key Characteristics of the Exposure:
Deception-Based: The core tactic is to deceive customers, partners, or employees into believing they are interacting with the legitimate company.
External Focus: This exposure is monitored outside the organizational perimeter, often involving the use of lookalike domains, fake social media profiles, or third-party marketplaces.
Business Impact: The primary risks include financial fraud (e.g., selling counterfeit goods), data theft (e.g., phishing for credentials on a fake login page), and long-term brand damage.
CTEM's Role in Managing Brand-Impersonation:
A CTEM program treats Brand-Impersonation as an exploitable pathway that must be continuously managed.
Discovery: CTEM continuously scans the internet (dark web, domain registries, social media) to find brand mentions and permutations that mimic the legitimate brand, such as typo-squatted domains or domains used to sell counterfeit products.
Prioritization: The exposure is prioritized not only by the impersonator's activity but also by the potential impact. A domain selling fake products directly to customers would be deemed a higher priority (due to immediate financial and reputational loss) than a simple informational copycat site.
Validation & Mobilization: Once a malicious impersonation is validated, the CTEM process mobilizes a rapid response, often involving takedown requests, legal action, or content blocking to neutralize the threat before further damage occurs.
ThreatNG is an all-in-one platform that implements the principles of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) by providing an external-adversary view of an organization's digital footprint. It continuously discovers, assesses, and prioritizes threats originating outside the network, effectively transforming reactive vulnerability management into proactive risk mitigation.
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG’s foundational capability is its ability to perform purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors. This means it scans the public internet to map the entire attack surface—domains, IP ranges, certificates, and cloud assets—just as an attacker would. This discovery process is continuous monitoring, which ensures that as new assets spin up (like a forgotten development server that becomes a "Directly Connected Internal System") or existing assets change state (such as a private repository becoming public), the exposure is immediately noted.
For example, this discovery would find:
Subdomains and associated IP addresses, leading to the identification of a "Corporate Internet Exposed Gateway Device."
Domains that are similar to the legitimate brand which is the starting point for detecting a "Typo Squatted Domain."
The existence of public code repositories, whether officially sanctioned or accidentally created by an employee, is essential for mitigating "Public Source Code Repository Company Sanctioned" or "Public Source Code Repository Employee Created" risks.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
The platform conducts detailed External Assessments to rate and prioritize the discovered risks. ThreatNG translates raw findings into actionable, cross-entity intelligence scores, giving security teams an instant understanding of the impact.
Specific ratings and their use include:
Cyber Risk Exposure: This rating focuses on infrastructure and systems. It would flag a high score for a "Directly Connected Internal System" because Domain Intelligence would reveal an exposed, sensitive port (such as RDP or SSH), indicating an immediate, exploitable access path. The assessment links this to Known Vulnerabilities in the identified software.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This rating is driven by the potential for sensitive information to be exposed. It would be high for a "Corporate Cloud Connected System" if Cloud and SaaS Exposure discovers an open, misconfigured cloud storage bucket (like an AWS S3 bucket), revealing the potential for sensitive data leakage. This also applies to risks like "Corporate Bank Account Routing Information Exposed" that may be found within those exposed cloud assets.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This score addresses the risk of business compromise via social engineering. Domain Intelligence heavily influences it, specifically the detection of a "Phishing Indicator Domain" via Domain Name Permutations that use targeted keywords like "login" or "secure." The score indicates the urgency of the domain takedown to the security team.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: This rating captures risks that directly harm public perception and revenue. It would highlight a "Counterfeit Product Offered For Sale Or Use" because it actively tracks brand abuse on external sites and marketplaces, allowing the security team to prioritize actions that preserve brand integrity.
Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG’s intelligence repositories, such as DarCache, provide the core data for many assessments. These repositories continuously ingest data from the dark web, hacker forums, and other underground sources to detect compromised data.
The Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture) repository is crucial for addressing exposures such as "Credentials Leaked With Hostname" and "Vendor System Dump With Credentials Offered Privately." It provides immediate confirmation that credentials are in the wild, enabling proactive password resets rather than waiting for an attack.
The Ransomware Groups and Activities (DarCache Ransomware) repository tracks the activity of numerous ransomware gangs. This is the source for detecting a "Ransom Dump Supplier" or "Ransom Dump Customer," which allows the organization to understand third-party risks and prepare for potential downstream data impacts.
Investigation Modules and Reporting
ThreatNG provides specialized investigation tools to act on the findings.
Reconnaissance Hub: This module is the unified command interface. It fuses the portfolio-wide view of Overwatch with the granular search of Advanced Search. For instance, if a critical vulnerability (a CVE) is announced, Overwatch instantly shows the organization's exposure across all assets, including those managed by vendors. The analyst then uses the Reconnaissance Hub to pivot to Advanced Search, filtering for all systems related to the affected vendor—specifically targeting a "Contractor Or Vendor Managed System"—to prioritize immediate remediation efforts.
Advanced Search: This facilitates detailed, granular investigations. An analyst can use search parameters and filters to find specific data quickly. For example, to investigate a potential "Homoglyph Attack Domain," an analyst uses Advanced Search to filter all Domain Name Permutations for homoglyph findings, rapidly validating the threat before it can be used for a targeted phishing campaign against employees.
Ultimately, this process enables efficient Reporting, transforming a large volume of chaotic external data into decisive security insight that security teams can use to prioritize threats in minutes.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's highly validated and prioritized external exposure data is designed to enhance the effectiveness of other security tools.
When ThreatNG's Code Secret Exposure feature finds a "Public Source Code Repository Employee Created" that contains exposed API keys, this critical finding, along with its risk score, can be automatically sent to a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform, the SOAR platform can immediately initiate a workflow to revoke the exposed keys, notify the code repository owner, and open a ticket, automating the response without manual intervention.
Similarly, if Dark Web Presence detects a large volume of "Infected Employee Owned Device Corporate Credentials" from a data leak, the entire list of compromised email addresses can be streamed to an organization’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. The SIEM can then correlate these external leaks with internal login attempts, instantly creating a high-fidelity alert if an attacker attempts to use the stolen credentials against the corporate network.
Finally, the findings from the External GRC Assessment—such as the identification of a "Remote Site Owned System Presumed Connected" running vulnerable software—can be automatically routed to a Ticketing or Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) system. This ensures the exposure is formally logged, assigned to the correct IT or subsidiary team for remediation, and tracked through the organization’s formal risk framework.
