Establishing a strong online presence in our interconnected world is no longer optional—it’s essential. Businesses thrive on digital opportunities, but increasingly, these channels pose unprecedented risks. By harnessing domain monitoring and other solutions, businesses counter their rapidly advancing adversaries.
Here, we’ll explore the evolving threats to ecommerce, the strengths and weaknesses of domain monitoring, and holistic digital risk protection strategies.
Key points:
- Domain monitoring helps businesses track threats to their web presence, but cyberattackers develop new tactics to hinder its accuracy and efficiency.
- Traditional domain monitoring struggles with false positives, inadequate content analysis, and challenges in timely threat detection, highlighting the need for a more comprehensive approach.
- EBRAND’s Digital Risk Protection offers an AI-powered solution to address these challenges and provide holistic defense against modern cyber threats.
How domain monitoring protects business online
Domain monitoring traditionally helps businesses identify, track, and eliminate threatening domain registrations from scammers and impersonators online. Malicious domains divert legitimate traffic, lure visitors into downloading malware or leaking data, and launch phishing attacks. Experts began deploying these kinds of tactics in the early 2000s. For a long time, traditional domain monitoring formed a core strategy for organizations worldwide.
However, over the last few years, technical innovations began to expose its limitations. Gone are the days when a mere Excel report sufficiently tracks newly registered domains. Manual qualification can’t handle modern domain threats, particularly without inbuilt workflows or mitigation tools. Businesses must explore and overcome these limitations to protect themselves online.
The limitations of traditional domain monitoring
Today, cybercriminals diversify their attack channels to evade a company’s defenses. Attackers broaden their target’s attack surfaces by concealing themselves through subdomains, unrelated domains, and other online channels like social media platforms.
Furthermore, their use of evasive tactics like homoglyphs and variations that omit the company name makes domain threats hard to detect and repel. The variation of a legitimate « examplebank.com » to a fraudulent « examp1ebank.com » highlights the power of changing a single character. This risk extends to many other, less conspicuous variations.
Sophisticated attacks demand a more comprehensive response, and here’s where traditional domain monitoring faces significant challenges:
- Volume of false positives: Companies with short or generic names often struggle with large volumes of false positives. These false alarms can divert resources and attention away from actual threats, reducing the effectiveness of the monitoring process.
- Content analysis: Monitoring should extend beyond domain ownership to include analyzing website content. Often unrelated domain names or subdomains of previously registered legitimate domains are used to attack.
- Timing of attacks: A domain might initially appear harmless but could later be activated for an attack. This dynamic nature requires more frequent and vigilant monitoring to detect changes.
- Quantity vs. quality: Merely knowing that hundreds of domains exist is not enough. The key is to identify which domains pose genuine threats. Traditional domain monitoring often struggles to differentiate between these domains, leading to potential oversight of critical risks.
To address these challenges, businesses need to adopt a proactive and multifaceted approach that combines domain monitoring with content analysis, frequent updates, and advanced threat intelligence.
How domain monitoring evolves with Digital Risk Protection
Digital Risk Protection enhances traditional domain monitoring, replacing obsolete spreadsheets with real-time tracking, machine-learning risk quantification, and active mitigation tools. Integrating these modern tools becomes crucial for preventing cyber threats and safeguarding online assets effectively.
Cybercriminals exploit variations and evolve their attacks. To tackle these challenges, AI-powered digital risk protection delivers a comprehensive approach with the following applications:
- Content scoring and image search: Evaluating content, images, and malicious intent for a more thorough threat assessment.
- Battling deceptive variations: Vigilantly monitoring and countering domain variations, thwarting cybercriminals’ attempts to evade detection.
- Identity-based risk scoring: an AI-powered analysis that assesses risks based on user behavior, historical data, and diverse variables in a custom brand vector space.
- Smart tracking technology: Checking the domain, website content, and technical setup, including DNS or MX setup changes.
In the dynamic landscape of cyber threats, businesses must innovate to survive.
Conclusions: Digital Risk Protection modernizes defenses
The move from domain monitoring to holistic digital risk protection represents a pivotal moment for online security. EBRAND’s Digital Risk Protection extends beyond domain safeguarding, fortifying online assets, social media, and third-party platforms. With seamless content scoring, vigilant monitoring, and identity-based risk assessment, EBRAND’s platform is a modern defense against today’s cyber threats. Our scope also delivers blocklisting, one-click enforcement, domain recovery, and domain acquisition, intercepting threats and covering any eventuality.
EBRAND’s Digital Risk Protection empowers you to secure your digital presence. Discover the details in this free resource.
