Adopting new technologies enables organizations to streamline their workflows and processes, save time, reduce errors, and augment their human workforce. But the flip side is that digital expansion also expands their attack surface, which inevitably increases digital risk.
Digital risk is the probability of damage or loss caused by a firm’s expanding digital ecosystem. It increases the chances that malicious actors may threaten the organization’s security and business continuity. These threats can be internal, say from disgruntled employees or third-party vendors, or they can come from external sources like hackers, cybercriminals, rogue nation-states, and cyber terrorists. All these threats and threat actors contribute to the digital risk landscape.
For modern organizations operating in the digital economy, protecting digital assets with proactive prevention is always better and cheaper than a reactive response. And the best way to safeguard digital assets from cyberattacks and data breaches is with Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS).
What is Digital Risk Protection?
Digital risk protection, or DRP, includes tools, strategies, and tactics to mitigate digital risk and protect the organization’s digital assets from cyberattacks. The overarching goal is to support the organization’s digital transformation efforts while managing and protecting its complex digital landscape. DRP efforts focus on protecting the organization’s external-facing digital assets from cybersecurity risk, insider threats, data leaks, automation risk, cloud technology risk, and third-party risk.
DRP systems are often considered synonymous with cyber threat intelligence (CTI) solutions, even though the two ideas are not the same. If anything, DRP is an extension of CTI. The main focus of digital threat intelligence is to improve the organization’s security posture so it can better withstand cyberattack attempts. DRP is more proactive since it focuses on keeping up with the organization’s expanding threat landscape, detecting threats, and preventing cyberattacks.
DRP involves the use of CTI insights plus intelligent algorithms and multiple reconnaissance methods to find and analyze threats in real time and raise warnings of imminent attacks to digital assets. Effective DRP can ease the burden of threat detection and mitigation on security teams. These threats and attacks may involve:
- Account takeovers
- Data leaks
- Fraud or extortion campaigns
- Reputational damage
- Fraudulent social media accounts
- Spoofed enterprise domains
DRP based on comprehensive CTI supports multiple use cases. It provides comprehensive protection from phishing, which is one of the most common attack vectors used by modern-day cybercriminals. DRP tools also provide security teams with greater visibility into the dark web where a large proportion of criminal activity is planned and enable them to monitor the supply chain for breaches. They can also leverage DRP solutions to prioritize vulnerabilities and alerts, monitor illegal data auctions and leaked credentials, and identify malicious mobile apps.
Why DRP?
To keep threat actors out of their digital perimeter, organizations need digital risk protection services, and must understand the implications of adopting new technologies.
It’s wise to start with being more cognizant of the nine types of digital risk they may be vulnerable to:
- Cybersecurity risk: The risk of cyberattacks and data breaches that may result in the unauthorized access of sensitive information and malicious acts like cyber extortion.
- Cloud technology risk: Technological errors and failures affecting cloud systems and processes.
- Process automation risk: Automation resulting in compatibility or governance issues.
- Third-party risk: The risks of third-party breaches or intellectual property theft created by contracting with third-party vendors.
- Data security and privacy risk: Risk affecting the security and privacy of sensitive data.
- Data leaks: The risk of data exposure developing into a full-blown breach.
- Workforce risk: Skill shortages, employee turnover, and other workforce-related issues that prevent the organization from achieving its business objectives.
- Compliance risk: Business practices that breach regulatory compliance standards.
- Resilience risk: Server outages, data breaches, and other risks that disrupt the availability of business services.
Digital risk protection is a vital element of business and enterprise risk management. It focuses on threat detection and automated remediation workflows to mitigate detected threats before they can develop into cyberattacks or data breaches.
Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS) refers to a managed service offering that enables organizations to effectively detect, prioritize, and respond to threats to their externally-exposed digital assets. Effective DRPS enables organizations to efficiently scale up their digital risk protection efforts and effectively safeguard their public attack surface from malicious actors and activities.
With DRPS, companies get 360° omnichannel visibility into all the digital and social platforms and channels comprising their attack surface. Such expansive visibility allows them to proactively detect and quickly respond to threats, especially on channels and regions that other security solutions do not – or cannot – monitor. These include social media channels, IoT devices, operational technology (OT), and cloud solutions.
Managed DRPS eliminates the need for internal security teams to manually monitor or remediate threats. They also don’t have to manage multiple technologies for different channels. Instead, managed services and unified advanced threat detection technology can help them to continually analyze and protect the public attack surface from all kinds of physical, cyber, and brand threats.
DRPS provides access to automated security technology that can take down fraudulent websites and social media accounts, notify review forums about false posts, inform app stores about fake apps, and apprise online marketplaces about counterfeit merchandise. They can even take down attacker infrastructure to stop threat actors in their tracks and discourage future attacks.
Automation: A Crucial Element of DRPS
Modern DRPS solutions provide automated data handling and analysis capabilities, which is crucial to keep security teams from getting overwhelmed by threat intelligence data and overlooking relevant, potentially dangerous threats. The intelligent algorithms in DRPS platforms automatically sift through masses of security data and prioritize alerts so teams can address the most pressing issues and protect the organization.
Automated DRPS can continuously and effectively find and address risks to the organization’s digital assets in real time. Responses are based on predefined criteria and initiated automatically, thus ensuring better security for users and data.
As part of a proactive defensive strategy, automated DRPS can effectively counter risks across an organization’s entire digital footprint. Over time, it empowers organizations of any size and in any industry to improve operational efficiency and protect their brand reputations. For all these reasons, Gartner expects the target audience for DRPS to increase from just 1% in 2020 to 10% in 2025.
Bolster: Automated DRPS for Advanced Enterprise Digital Risk Protection
Bolster is the only automated digital risk protection platform in the world that detects, analyzes, and takes down fraudulent content across the web, social media, app stores, and even the dark web. It incorporates state-of-the-art technology to protect enterprise external attack surfaces—without the need for legacy solutions or time-consuming manual efforts.
Our automated DRP platform uses image recognition to detect a wide range of threats. It provides 360-degree coverage and immediate visibility into counterfeit websites, fraudulent content, phishing sites, and many other digital risks. With Bolster, security teams can consolidate up to five tools and automate the detection, analysis, and rapid removal of threats from their digital ecosystem.
To try Bolster for free, schedule a complimentary demo.
