There are numerous ways that cyber criminals can take advantage of organizations. One type of threat, which often can lead to more destructive consequences than other types of attacks, is how they can exploit and damage your brand.
Some of these threats are a form of commercial infringement - for example, cheap or counterfeit products or services sold from a website that appears to be associated with your trademark. But many brand threats are much more harmful than that, such as schemes that try to steal personal information from your customers using a URL that contains your brand name (or a twist on it - "C00L" instead of "COOL" for example) and disguising themselves as you.
Threats like these can cause real damage to your brand and directly erode its value and equity for anyone who is directly exposed to them. Even more, they can cause serious and lasting damage to your reputation in the market, undermining the trust of your customers, potential customers and business partners.
That’s why threats like these should be prioritized just as highly as ransom attacks or other costly incidents we so often hear about in the media. While cyber incidents that cost your business money often can be resolved quickly after the attack has happened, it’s nearly impossible to build back the reputation and trust for your brand that you’ve worked so hard for. It is therefore important to try mitigating these types of incidents before they do any damage – a role for the IT security team.
Threat Intelligence - Protect your brand before the damage is done
Luckily, with access to what we call Threat Intelligence, incidents like these can be mitigated before they can make any harm. Threat Intelligence is based on huge amounts of data that various organizations have collected and can help your security team make more informed decisions. Many manufacturers and CERT, for example, have long been tracking information related to security threats and made them available for free through their websites.
Why is good Threat Intelligence so important?
At Baffin Bay Networks, we maintain a threat database that is constantly being filled with data collected by thousands of sensors running on the Internet. If one were to analyze this manually, it would take considerable time, effort and expertise to convert all the information into information that is relevant to an organization. But at Baffin Bay, we use machine learning to analyze this data and can provide the fastest and best possible summary of the threats out there, relevant to your organization. That information, along with feeds from other sources, provides the information that the IT security team needs.
With good Threat Intelligence, you can stop the threats before they are executed and start doing damage, which means that you will not have to worry about losing customers or having to build your brand reputation back up from scratch.