Digital Risk Protection Assurance
Digital Risk Protection Assurance (DRP Assurance) is a cybersecurity practice that focuses on continuously monitoring and proactively defending an organization's digital assets, brand reputation, and stakeholders against external threats beyond the traditional security perimeter. It represents a commitment to maintaining a comprehensive, verified, and continuously optimized security posture against risks found on the open, deep, and dark web.
Core Components of DRP Assurance
DRP Assurance is built upon a continuous cycle of visibility, protection, disruption, and management, effectively extending the security team's reach across the entire digital ecosystem.
Visibility and Digital Footprint Mapping: This foundational component involves continuous asset discovery and mapping of an organization's full digital footprint. It provides a real-time, external view of all internet-facing assets, domains, social media accounts, cloud services, and employees' external exposures. This assures that security coverage is comprehensive and that unknown or unmanaged assets are brought under protection.
External Threat Monitoring: Assurance requires continuous, real-time scanning of external channels—including the surface web, deep web, and dark web—for indicators of potential harm. This specifically looks for:
Brand Impersonation: Detection of lookalike (typosquatted) domains, fraudulent social media profiles, and malicious mobile applications masquerading as the organization's official brand.
Data Leakage: Identifying exposed sensitive information, such as compromised credentials, intellectual property, or customer data, on paste sites or criminal forums.
Adversary Chatter: Monitoring underground forums for discussions about attack planning, targeted campaigns, or the sale of corporate access.
Threat Intelligence and Contextualization: DRP Assurance integrates Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) to provide contextual insight into threat actors' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). By correlating identified external risks with active cyberattack methods, the assurance process ensures risk prioritization is accurate and business-aligned, focusing on threats most likely to be exploited.
Proactive Mitigation and Disruption: Assurance extends beyond passive monitoring to active risk mitigation. Once a threat is identified and verified, enforcement actions are taken to neutralize it before it escalates into a breach. Actions include automated takedowns of fraudulent websites, reporting malicious social media accounts, and securing compromised employee accounts.
Compliance and Risk Management: DRP Assurance helps organizations meet regulatory requirements by proactively identifying and addressing risks to sensitive customer data and demonstrating continuous monitoring of external threats. It supports compliance frameworks such as GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27002, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
DRP Assurance is an external, proactive defense strategy that safeguards reputation, customer trust, and financial stability by ensuring continuous visibility and rapid response to all external digital risks.
Digital Risk Protection Assurance (DRP Assurance) is a commitment to proactively defending an organization’s brand, customers, and employees from external threats, and ThreatNG’s capabilities are specifically designed to deliver this assurance by continuously monitoring the external digital ecosystem.
ThreatNG’s Role in Digital Risk Protection Assurance
ThreatNG provides the necessary continuous visibility, external assessment, and contextual intelligence to assure an organization's defense against threats originating from the surface, deep, and dark web.
1. External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery, using no connectors. This foundational capability ensures comprehensive visibility across the entire digital footprint, extending DRP Assurance beyond the organization’s owned infrastructure to cover third-party and brand-related exposures.
Example: ThreatNG uses its Domain Intelligence to uncover Web3 Domain Discovery and Identification (like .eth and .crypto domains). By checking the availability of these domains, ThreatNG assures that the organization can register available domains to secure its brand presence, or identify already-taken domains to detect potential risks such as brand impersonation and phishing schemes.
2. External Assessment
ThreatNG's assessments focus on quantifying external digital risks (A-F security ratings) that directly undermine DRP Assurance.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This rating is key to DRP Assurance, as it focuses on threats to employees and customers. It is based on findings across Domain Name Permutations (typosquatting and manipulations), Domain Permutations with Mail Record, missing DMARC and SPF records, and Compromised Credentials (Dark Web Presence).
Example: If ThreatNG finds a domain permutation using a TLD-swap (e.g., companyname.co instead of companyname.com) that has an active mail record, it provides a poor BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Rating. This finding assures the security team that an active, high-risk phishing vector is in play, requiring immediate action.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: This rating directly addresses reputation risk. It is based on Domain Name Permutations (available and taken), Domain Permutations with Mail Record, ESG Violations (including competition, consumer-protection, employment offenses), Lawsuits, and Negative News.
Example: The assessment uncovers a domain permutation using "Offensive Language" or "Critical Language" keywords (like boycott or bad). This finding is irrefutable evidence that an external asset is being used to damage the brand, allowing the DRP program to manage the narrative risk proactively.
3. Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG’s capability for Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings for all organizations ensures that DRP Assurance is maintained in real time. As the external digital ecosystem is constantly changing, continuous monitoring ensures no new brand or digital risks are missed.
4. Investigation Modules
The Investigation Modules provide the deep intelligence and contextual correlation necessary for proactive protection and disruption.
Domain Name Permutations: This module detects and groups manipulations and additions to a domain, including substitutions, insertions, TLD swaps, and homoglyphs. This intelligence is used to identify potential brand impersonation and phishing sites outside the firewall.
Example: An investigation into a potential phishing threat uses Domain Name Permutations to find an actively registered domain that has been bitsquatted (a single-bit error) and has a mail record, thereby pinpointing the source of the campaign.
Social Media: This module proactively safeguards an organization by closing the "Narrative Risk" gap, turning publicly discussed security flaws and threat actor plans (the Conversational Attack Surface) into a protective shield against targeted attacks.
Example: Reddit Discovery functions as a Digital Risk Protection system that transforms unmonitored public chatter on Reddit into a high-fidelity, early-warning intelligence platform, enabling security leaders to manage Narrative Risk proactively.
Dark Web Presence: This module uncovers organizational mentions of related people, places, or things, Associated Ransomware Events, and Associated Compromised Credentials. This is core to DRP Assurance because it detects where an attacker is planning an attack or selling access.
5. Intelligence Repositories
The repositories (DarCache) provide the deep threat context needed to inform and prioritize DRP Assurance efforts.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository allows DRP teams to immediately identify and secure employees or users whose credentials have been leaked externally.
Ransomware Groups and Activities (DarCache Ransomware): Tracking over 70 Ransomware Gangs provides critical context. If the Dark Web Presence module finds an organization mentioned by a specific ransomware group, this repository provides immediate threat intelligence to inform the DRP response.
SEC Form 8-Ks (DarCache 8-Ks): These provide financial context. The disclosure of a breach or significant event in an 8-K filing can be correlated with other findings, assuring DRP efforts are focused on risks with proven financial and legal impact.
Collaboration with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus and high-confidence findings enhance DRP Assurance when used alongside other security tools.
Complementary Solutions for Social Media Management (SMM): When ThreatNG’s Social Media module identifies a fraudulent social media account (a brand impersonation) or highly negative chatter, the intelligence can be pushed directly to an SMM platform's risk dashboard. This ensures the SMM team has the necessary Legal-Grade Attribution to execute takedown procedures and maintain brand integrity swiftly.
Complementary Solutions for Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): ThreatNG's Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility rating is based on findings like Compromised Credentials and Exposed Ports. If a compromised credential is found, the intelligence can be fed to an EDR solution to automatically increase monitoring or restrict access for the associated internal user account, thereby serving as a preventive measure informed by external risk.
