Digital Risk Protection Software

Understanding Digital Risk Protection Software

Digital Risk Protection (DRP) consists of protecting digital assets and brand reputation from external threats. As organizations increase their external attack surfaces, they expand their threat and attack surfaces, increasing risks associated with malicious actors. A digital risk protection solution provides insight by contextualizing data for real-time threat identification, tracking, and troubleshooting. 

Using Flare for Digital Risk Protection

How does Flare answer digital risk protection needs? 

Flare continuously monitors the clear & dark web and illicit Telegram channels to identify digital threats outside the organization’s perimeters, including mentions of domains, usernames, and brand. The platform automates cyber reconnaissance so organizations can identify digital risks, like secrets leaked from GitHub or user credentials being sold on illicit Telegram channels. 

How does Flare’s AI help mitigate digital risk?

Flare’s AI-powered assistant contextualizes digital risks by explaining technical exposures and translating cybercriminal activities written in foreign languages like Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and French. With Flare, security analysts can automate time-consuming manual processes and prioritize the exposures that pose the largest digital risk to the company. 

What are the key benefits of the Flare digital risk protection solution?

• Gain continuous cyber reconnaissance coverage across the entirety of the organization’s external attack surface
• Identify previously unknown digital risks, like undetected data breaches and leakages
• Reduce costs arising from multiple monitoring channels that consume financial and staff resources 

Digital Risk Protection: A Brief Overview

What are digital risks?

Digital risk is the likelihood that external threat actors can use an organization’s expanded external attack surfaces to cause harmful outcomes. As organizations integrate new technologies into their environments, they should understand the following types of digital risks:

• Cybersecurity: threat actors gaining unauthorized access to and stealing sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property 
• Data leaks: unintentional exposures of sensitive data without threat actors gaining unauthorized access to an organization’s systems and networks, like secrets stored in public GitHub repositories
• Workforce members: people with legitimate access to systems and networks that purposefully or accidentally expose sensitive data
• Third-parties: service providers or third-party vendors purposefully or accidentally exposing sensitive data 
• Technology: sensitive data exposure arising from architecting, deploying, or implementing new cloud technologies
• Compliance: fines and penalties related to violating compliance requirements
• Service availability: business and customer disruptions arising from external threats, like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
• Privacy: protected information exposure arising from internal or external unauthorized access

How does digital risk protection work?

Digital risk protection helps security teams detect, investigate, and mitigate impact to the organization’s data by enabling:

• Visibility: providing insights about threat activity targeting brands, people, data, and digital or physical assets across the clear, deep, and dark webs as well as illicit Telegram channels
• Mitigation: reducing the likelihood and impact of cyber threats, like phishing campaigns, impersonation attacks, malicious domains, malware or scripting attacks, and data theft
• Remediation: enhancing alerts and giving actionable intelligence that security analysts can use to proactively threat hunt and identify vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them

What are the primary use cases for digital risk protection?

In today’s connected business world, digital risks occur within an organization’s systems and networks as well as beyond them. Digital risk protection enables organizations to gain comprehensive insights that enable:

• Brand protection: digital brand protection to mitigate risks arising from cybercriminals abusing or exploiting intellectual property, like logos and copyrighted material
• Domain monitoring and protection: identification of fake domains that attackers use during phishing attacks to steal credentials or deliver malware
• Social media protection: detection and removal of social media accounts impersonating the brand that attackers use to scam or defraud customers or employees
• Executive protection:  identification and removal of cybercriminals pretending to be a company’s leadership team member by detecting leaked credentials, sensitive data, travel plans, or attack chatter
• Physical threat protection: situational awareness for insight into online conversations about critical company facilities or locations
• Dark web monitoring: detection of compromised data, stolen credential, or targeted attacks by gaining visibility into deep and dark web forums or illicit Telegram channels

Why Is Digital Risk Protection Especially Relevant Now

Why do you need digital risk protection in today’s cybersecurity landscape?

As organization’s add new technologies to their environments, they expand their external threat landscape. In a business world where the perimeter is as wide as the internet, security teams need to address these new threats. 

Digital risk protection enables security team to identify and address:

• Malicious actor chatter about attack targets
• New malware and ransomware variants
• Leaked or stolen data being sold through cybercriminal channels
• Exploits targeting known vulnerabilities and 0-day attacks
• Phishing and spear phishing attacks targeting the organization’s customers, employees, and senior leadership teams

What is the difference between digital risk protection and threat intelligence?

Although threat intelligence and digital risk protection both address social media protection, they monitor for different threats. Threat intelligence focuses:

• Attack surface monitoring 
• Vulnerability detection
• Vulnerability remediation
• Third-party security risk ratings

Typically, these are vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit from the inside-out. However, digital risk protection focuses on detecting and responding to cyber threats or compromised data outside the organization’s typical security controls like:

• Account takeovers
• Brand compromise
• Brand compromise
• Fraud campaigns
• Reputational damage
• Data leaked during a third-party data breach, like sensitive data or credentials

Why digital risk protection should be a cross-functional concern

Although digital risk protection is traditionally considered a technology concern, it touches on issues impacting the line of business teams as well. For example, digital risk protection involves:

• Marketing teams: Monitoring for fake or spoofed websites and social media accounts
• Legal teams: Identifying leaked intellectual property, copyright/trademark infringement, mergers and acquisition risks, third-party vendor risk
• Security teams: Monitoring for targeted attacks, like phishing campaigns or credential-based attacks
• Human resources teams: Monitoring communications and collaboration platforms to identify potentially malicious or disgruntled employees

Digital Risk 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 automates digital risk protection monitoring so that organizations can proactively address threats outside their perimeters for improved cybersecurity and data privacy. 

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.