This article was updated on December 22nd, 2025.
Brand protection technologies actively scan and identify questionable listings that misuse a brand, such as by offering fake products or perpetrating frauds. These tools produce analytics offering insights into how a brand might be at risk, along with actionable advice for organizations to manage their online presence.
Your brand exists beyond your website though. It lives in: dark web forums where stolen credentials are traded, in GitHub repositories where developers accidentally commit secrets, on paste sites where data dumps surface, and across social media where impersonators target your customers and employees.
Digital brand protection isn’t just about monitoring for counterfeit products or trademark infringement—it’s about detecting the technical threats that can escalate into full-blown security incidents and make the news:
- Leaked source code exposing vulnerabilities
- Stolen employee credentials enabling account takeovers
- Sophisticated phishing campaigns built on cloned websites
These threats damage both brand reputation and security posture simultaneously.
Digital Brand Protection: Brief Overview
What are Common Threats to a Digital Brand?
Common threats to an organization’s digital brand include:
- Counterfeit products and unauthorized sales: Scammers try to capitalize on a brand’s reputation by selling lower quality imitation products that can undermine legitimate sales and damage reputation.
- Trademark and copyright infringement: Malicious actors can register and monetize similar logos, slogans, or brand names in other countries, diluting a brand’s value.
- Social media and website impersonation for phishing: Cybercriminals often base fake websites and social media accounts on well-known brands that they use to steal credentials or payment information, ultimately undermining customer trust.
- Defamatory content and negative reviews: Fake negative reviews can undermine brand reputation by spreading falsehoods about service or product quality.
- Data breaches: Customers value their data, and news reports about a company experiencing a data breach can lead to customer churn or lost sales.
- Ad fraud: Domain hijacking and click fraud can increase marketing spend and undermine analytics that reduce the online strategy’s effectiveness.
How Does Digital Brand Protection Work?
Digital brand protection monitors the clear, dark, and deep web for any mention of a company’s name so that the organization can identify illegitimate and illegal uses of it. Typically, the process includes:
- Brand monitoring and visibility: detecting trademarks, logos, and other brand assets across mobile app stores, domains, social media accounts, email accounts, collaboration platforms, ecommerce sites, and other legal and illegal digital channels
- Threat alerts: real-time alerts so cybersecurity teams can quickly take action against digital threats and decrease mean time to respond (MTTR)
- Remediation: initiating activities like taking down fake sites or working with social media platforms to remove impersonators
How Should Organizations Prioritize Digital Brand Protection?
Organizations should include digital brand protection as part of their overall cybersecurity strategy. Cybercriminals use brands to legitimize their illegal activities, hiding themselves behind a curtain of company reputation. Security teams can define detection parameters so they can remove low-priority or legitimate brand mentions and focus on high-value threats and alerts.
Why is Digital Brand Protection Especially Relevant Now?
The Importance of Digital Protection
Safeguarding a brand’s digital reputation is critical to a company’s revenue objectives. By protecting your digital brand and image, you can:
- Improve customer trust and loyalty: Customers across business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) spaces make buying decisions based on emotions and brand connections. When they find counterfeit or unauthorized sellers, they may lose trust in the organization or find a cheaper option that diverts sales away from legitimate channels.
- Comply with regulatory requirements: Data leaks indicate potential security control failures that can be viewed as compliance violations. By protecting digital brand reputation, organizations gain insights into data leaks that may include legally protected PII that would lead to fines or penalties.
- Visibility into brand exposure: Monitoring for a brand’s name across the clear, dark, and deep web can provide insights about how customers view the company and threats facing it. With this visibility, organizations can take proactive steps to mitigate risk while improving resilience and revenue.
Why is Digital Brand Protection Challenging?
Some of the challenges organizations face in digital brand protection include:
- Unsophisticated threat actors easily registering domains or cloning a website with tools purchased from the dark web
- Employees’ online activities making it easier for cybercriminals to pose as senior leadership members and reach out through networking sites, like LinkedIn
- Cybercriminal activities occurring outside the organization’s networks and perimeter making it more difficult to identify threats
Why Do you Need Digital Brand Protection in Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape?
In a world where customers use the internet to make buying decisions, threat actors engage in various forms of brand abuse as part of social engineering attacks. Some examples of the crossover between cybercriminal activity and digital brand protection include:
- Cybersquatting: claiming domain names related to a brand before the organization can claim them to leverage the brand’s value
- Typosquatting: claiming domains that use common brand name spelling errors
- Imitation sites: designing websites similar in look and feel to the brand’s official site to trick people into thinking it’s the real one
- Social media phishing: creating fake social media accounts that include the organization’s name and logo to entice people into sharing sensitive information
- Fake job postings: placing fraudulent job posting on career websites then getting applications to provide sensitive information or engage in unlawful activity
Using Flare to Help with Digital Brand Protection
How Does Flare Answer Digital Brand Protection Needs?
Flare enables organizations to monitor the clear and dark web continuously, looking for any mentions of the brand’s name. The platform monitors for data leaks across the internet, including in GitHub, that can include the organization’s intellectual property, like technical data, source code, or secrets. Clear web monitoring for mentions of brand names can identify counterfeit products or fake websites that undermine reputation.
Your Intellectual Property Is One Misconfiguration Away from Exposure
Flare enables organizations to monitor continuously for data leaks that put your brand at risk—scanning GitHub, DockerHub, and paste sites for exposed source code, API keys, and secrets. When technical data leaks, it’s not just a security issue—it’s a brand issue.
Flare researchers discovered a publicly accessible DockerHub image containing hardcoded Azure credentials, database connection strings, and API keys—a single developer mistake that exposed an enterprise to infrastructure compromise, data breach, and reputational damage.
How Does Flare’s Data Leak Monitoring Answer Digital Brand Protection Use Cases?
Flare’s data leak monitoring capability detects malicious and accidental intellectual property loss outside the organization’s “perimeter.” Data leaks that harm digital brands can include anything from sensitive code that a developer leaves on GitHub to stolen information that surfaces on a site like Pastebin. Since Flare automatically scans the dark, deep, and clear web for leaked data, organizations can identify the sensitive data leaks before they harm the brand’s reputation.
When Your Partners Get Breached, Your Brand Is on the Line
Ransomware groups don’t just encrypt data—they publish it. When a vendor, supplier, or partner appears on a ransomware leak site, your organization’s sensitive data may be exposed alongside theirs. Customer contracts, internal communications, and proprietary information surface publicly, creating immediate brand and compliance risk.
Your data lives in your vendors’ systems. When they’re hit by ransomware, your customer records, contracts, and intellectual property become collateral damage.
Leaked data erodes customer trust—even when the breach wasn’t yours. Headlines don’t distinguish between “their breach” and “your data.”
Flare monitors ransomware leak sites across the dark web—including LockBit, BlackCat, Cl0p, and dozens of other groups—alerting you when your organization or supply chain partners appear. Early detection gives you time to assess exposure, notify stakeholders, and get ahead of the story before it becomes a PR crisis.
What are the Key Benefits of Flare for Digital Brand Protection?
- Easily monitoring online code repositories for accidentally leaks source code or secrets
- Alerting teams to accidental commits that can arise from human error across software development teams that consist of full time employees and contractors
- Automated monitoring for mentions of company or email domain on anonymous sharing sites, like Pastebin, for password dumps, technical data, and personally identifiable information (PII)
Digital Brand Protection and Flare
Flare provides the leading Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution for organizations. Our technology constantly scans the online world, including the clear & dark web, to discover unknown events, automatically prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Flare enables you to combine your cybersecurity monitoring with your digital brand protection objectives for a comprehensive view of digital risk.
Our solution integrates into your security program in 30 minutes to provide your team with actionable intelligence and automated remediation for high-risk exposure. See it yourself with our free trial.
