Your company’s brand is arguably the most important part of your business. Building a brand varies from company to company, and the companies that do this best have a relationship with their customers can be best described as a cult following. When customers interact with these brands, they follow the company in the media, they rave about the company to their friends and family, and most importantly, they cannot wait to make another purchase. DomainGuard understands the importance of protecting the brand and image your company has worked so hard to build.

Phishing and Brand Protection are two sides of the same coin. Our platform protects your organization from phishing attacks while simultaneously protecting your brand from being abused by threat actors. We all understand the importance of protecting employees from phishing attacks, DomainGuard believes it’s equally important to ensure your customers are protected from similar attacks against your brand.

How threat actors abuse your brand

Threat actors abuse the positive relationship your organization has worked so hard to blossom over the years, with your customers. They create fake websites using your company’s logos and style guide in an attempt to deceive your customers.

Customer Account Takeover

Customer Account Takeover is the process whereby a threat actor compromises one of your customer’s accounts. Threat actors facilitate these attacks by creating a copy of your company’s website or by creating a new site utilizing your company’s logo and\or style guide. These attacks are similar to phishing with the primary difference being your customers are the target as opposed to your employees.

Below we show an example of a fraudulent website, which cloned an existing bank’s website and used their trademarked logo. While the website was not a 1:1 match, the fraudulent website included key elements from the original bank’s brand. This website could’ve been used to target the bank’s customers and attempt to take over their accounts.

DomainGuard was the first security vendor to identify and report on this fraudulent website. The website was quickly taken down, reducing the overall likelihood that customers of this bank were affected.

Retail Fraud

In the retail space, DomainGuard has identified threat actors register and create fraudulent websites which leverage a popular retailer’s name. The attackers then add words such as “store or shop” to the brand’s name. Some of these websites even replicate the original site and reduce their prices, providing an additional incentive by displaying heavily discounted goods.

In the example below, DomainGuard identified a fake jewelery store which utilized a popular retailers brand in the URL , as well as their trademarked logo.

The Intersection of Legal and Cybersecurity

DomainGuard’s brand and fraud protection lives right at the intersection of Legal and Cybersecurity. On the security front, DomainGuard takes down fraudulent sites, the moment malicious activity is identified. DomainGuard provides threat intel to your security team in a manner easily ingested by other security tools. On the legal front, DomainGuard captures evidence of wrongdoing, copyright or trademark infringement, and forwards these results to your legal team, expediting the legal process. DomainGuard detects wrongful usages of your trademarked logos to help protect the very same assets your teams have worked so hard to build from being used in an attack against your brand.

Monitoring Works

In both the of the image examples above, DomainGuard was to first security vendor to identify and report on these fraudulent sites - limiting their overall impact. DomainGuard proactively monitors your brand across the internet and takes down fraudulent sites the moment they are infringing on your brand.