Digital Risk Protection⁚ Strategies To Monitor Brand Abuse

Greetings, Hope y’all good and fine!

What is Digital Risk Protection?

Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is a proactive cybersecurity approach designed to safeguard organizations from external threats targeting their digital presence. It involves monitoring and protecting assets such as websites, domains, cloud environments, and social media accounts to prevent data breaches, brand damage, and financial losses.

It also enables organizations to detect phishing and scam attacks before they are launched, as well as protect against piracy by preventing the unauthorized distribution and usage of digital content.

One of the most important aspects of DRP—and the focus of our discussion today—is Brand Protection.

What is Brand Protection?

Brand Protection ensures the security of an organization’s brand by defending it against misuse, impersonation, or counterfeit activities. These threats can occur across websites, social media, apps, or online marketplaces.

Now, let’s explore how to develop a strategy for monitoring the online space to protect a brand from cyber threats, such as fake social media accounts or counterfeit websites.

Identifying Counterfeit Websites

A common tactic employed by threat actors is creating counterfeit websites that closely mimic a brand’s identity. They achieve this by using similar domain names, brand trademarks, logos, and visual elements to deceive users.

To identify such websites, it’s essential to think like a threat actor and anticipate the techniques they might use. Here’s how:

Monitoring Domain Names

Collect and analyze all possible domain names that threat actors might use to impersonate your brand. Look out for impersonation techniques such as:

• Homographic attacks (e.g., using visually similar characters, like “rn” instead of “m”)

• TLD (Top-Level Domain) variations (e.g., .com vs. .net)

• Combo squatting (e.g., combining brand terms with other words)

• Typosquatting (e.g., deliberate misspellings or typos)

Using Tools like DNSTwist Tools like DNSTwist can generate a wordlist of domain name variations, which may be used by threat actors. These tools analyze the generated wordlist against DNS servers and highlight any registered or active domains that could pose a threat.

DNSTwist is especially useful for uncovering domains set up for impersonation, helping you stay ahead of potential risks. You can find DNSTwist on its GitHub page or through resources like Kali Linux Tools.

Identify abused brand products/properties (Trademark and Copyright)

Monitoring all brand products or properties that could be counterfeited and sold by unauthorized third parties is crucial for effective brand protection. Here’s how you can tackle this:

• Utilize OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) to monitor specific products or properties by their names (keywords) or images to identify sources of misuse.

• Develop a Script to scrape search engines and detect websites promoting counterfeit brand products or properties.

• Monitor SSL Certificates for domains with names similar to your brand to spot potential impersonations.

• Use Shodan and Censys to monitor HTML titles containing your brand’s name.

• Employ Shodan to track the brand’s favicon icon hash for misuse.

• Perform Reverse Image Searches using tools like TinyEye, Yandex, or Google to detect brand logos or products hosted elsewhere without authorization.

Identifying fake social media accounts

Fake social media accounts pose a significant threat to your brand’s reputation. Here are ways to stay ahead of these risks:

• Regularly search for your brand name across social media platforms to identify unauthorized accounts.

• Adopt the same techniques threat actors use, such as Homographic, Combo, or Typosquatting, to mimic their strategies.

• Use tools that search usernames across multiple social media platforms, such as idcrawl or namechk, to detect impostor accounts effectively.

With these strategies in place, organizations can effectively monitor and address cyber threats, ensuring their brand’s reputation and trust remain intact.

Investigating A Suspicious Counterfeit Websites

If you come across a suspicious website that you suspect is counterfeit and possibly malicious, here’s a step-by-step guide to analyze it:

Domain Analysis

1. WHOIS Record Check: By checking the WHOIS record we can look at:
   • Review the date of creation and last update. If it’s recently created or updated that would raise suspicious concerns
   • Confirm the registrar name for legitimacy.
2. Threat Intelligence Platforms: In order to check if was reported as malicious
   • Cross-check the domain on platforms like:
   • VirusTotal
   • IBM X-Force
   • URLhaus

IP Address Analysis

IP Lookup:

1. Extract the domain’s IP address.
2. Investigate the IP against tools Threat Intelligence Platforms like:
   • AbuseIPDB
   • VirusTotal
   • IBM X-Force
3. Determine the Autonomous System (AS) ownership.

SSL Certificate Inspection

• Verify if an SSL certificate exists.
• Check if the SSL certificate’s domain matches the website in question.

Manual Inspection

• Use tools such as:
  • url2png.com
  • urlscan.io
  • browsling.com
  • wannabrowse.com
• Explore the site in a sandboxed environment to ensure safety.

Action to be taken if the domain was suspicious

• Blocking the IPs & Domain names
• Reporting the Domain and IPs to the right parties (ISPs) to take down these IPs & Domains, Including public platforms such as AbuseIPDB ..etc.