Your organization’s brand is more than just a logo. It’s your identity, and one that has taken time, effort, and money to cultivate. Online brand abuse, particularly that which relies on domain impersonation and fraud to be successful, is more achievable than ever, making effective brand protection increasingly complex.
Brand abuse comes in all shapes, sizes, and forms, but ultimately the term is used to describe the infringement of a company’s brand by an outside party or attacker. This party will use your business’ reputation for its own gain, at the expense of your brand equity.
In this online landscape, your domain is your shopfront. It's your way of representing your brand online, communicating with and selling to your customers, and ultimately growing your business. It’s no surprise then, that bad actors make every effort to exploit it, piggybacking off the hard work you’ve put into building it, using it to commit fraud, and damaging it for the long term. So, when it comes to protecting your brand online, you need to start by securing your domain.
Implement security standards to block brand abuseImplementing DMARC at its strongest policy of p=reject is the first step to securing your domain against brand abuse. By doing this you are blocking bad actors from impersonating your domain to carry out phishing attacks, Business Email Compromise, and other types of fraud via email, and stopping them from tarnishing your brand. DMARC is the foundational layer of protection for your most valuable and vulnerable digital asset: your domain.
Enable use of legitimate logo in email with BIMI
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) displays validated trademarked logos for all DMARC-authenticated emails. As email continues to be the most popular way organizations communicate, BIMI adds brand impressions to every email to help reassure recipients that it is from the organization it claims to be from.
Discover and takedown lookalike sites Much of the success of today’s online brand abuse hangs on the attacker’s ability to spin up a lookalike website domain. Having sent out their phishing email (or other form of attack), they can then direct their victim to a fake site, harvesting credentials, money, and more. To combat this, it’s crucial that businesses include lookalike discovery and takedown functionality as part of their modern brand protection strategy. By using functionality that ensures parked, forgotten, and impersonation domains are uncovered and removed, you can actively block attackers attempting to use your domain (and brand) to commit fraud.
A big brand should be ensuring email security and deliverability, and I’d certainly recommend OnDMARC as an effective partner.
Red Sift Solution Suites have been developed to address the high priority issues cyber-first organizations face today.
