Throughout Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it might be easy to believe you’ve heard everything there is to know about protecting your business’ virtual assets. After all, in this age of identity theft and corporate data breaches, many companies have invested heavily in defending their internal networks and virtual infrastructures from hackers, malware, viruses, and other cybersecurity threats that could undermine their performance or cause great financial loss. No doubt you’ve attended many a seminar or company-sponsored training courses that covers how to defend against trojan files, phishing emails, fake website logins, and more.

Despite this heavy emphasis on cybersecurity vigilance, many companies overlook an essential aspect of ensuring the strength and sanctity of their online footprint—protecting their digital brand.

What exactly is digital brand protection?

Digital brand protection means taking whatever steps are necessary to defend yourself against illegal or malicious brand usage, intellectual property violations or infringements, or other attacks that harm your company name and image. While many companies can define the value of firewalls, IT training, and anti-virus software, they often don’t realize their most valuable asset—their brand—can just as easily come under attack and be irreparably damaged because they don’t have the tools or skills in place to monitor their digital reputation.

Digital brand attacks often come in the form of fraud or abuse of digital property, such as rogue mobile apps masquerading as legitimate offerings from your company while harming your customer base.

If your digital brand comes under assault, the fallout can be disastrous, especially if you only become aware of your vulnerability well after the fact and must scramble to simply contain the damage before it gets worse. However, you can have proactive monitoring in place that takes down attack campaigns before any damage is caused.

Consequences can include:

• Degraded Customer Loyalty– If customers download a rogue app bearing your company logo or receive emails seemingly from your customer support team that end up being scams, they’re going to wonder why your business didn’t do more to alert them to such threats and possibly spread negative word-of-mouth about the experience.
• Negative Publicity– You certainly don’t want to be in the news for things like being the victim of the latest client database hack or for cybercriminals to be operating under your name as they misrepresent fund allocation.
• Legal Culpability– Your company could be sued by unhappy customers for not taking the proper precautions to protect their data, or you could be forced to go to court to fight for your own intellectual property that is being misused.
• Heavy Financial Loss– Not only might you lose customers, but funds that might’ve once gone to buy your products or services might be diverted via illicit websites or to pay for rogue mobile apps that customers think legitimately come from you.

Digital brand protection as a proactive defense strategy compared to the more static components of internal cybersecurity methods, which wait for the potential assault to materialize. Properly developed and implemented, digital brand protection services constantly monitor and seek out potential threats to your brand, with the intent to mitigate or eliminate them before any damage is even done.

By bringing digital brand protection into your overall cybersecurity program, you can help your company establish a more comprehensive defense that scrutinizes, detects, and deals with threats both internally and externally.

How can you do this most effectively?

By partnering with a team like FraudWatch International, which devotes its core resources and services to protecting digital brands. As cybersecurity experts, we look beyond the fixed security infrastructure most organizations rely on and create and deploy custom risk identification and defense tactics. FraudWatch International monitors the digital landscape using a scalable services framework that can be adapted to your current systems and performance standards.

Not only does FraudWatch International help you put these protective measures in place, but the team also helps your organization understand the reality of digital brand protection and see its relevance throughout all operational levels. This way, you can adjust your processes and communications to be more secure and empower your own staff to contribute to this aspect of cybersecurity.

Discover what it takes to establish true digital brand protection and how FraudWatch International can bolster your current cybersecurity measures above-and-beyond industry-leading standards.