Building a Defense Against Cybersecurity Fraud and Brand Impersonation

3 Minute Read

Extend the reach of security to fight threats beyond the SOC.

Cyber threats present themselves in a variety of ways. We constantly hear about cyberwarfare, supply chain attacks and breaches through security gaps. While these are all serious issues and something we should be seriously concerned about, they only represent a percentage of the threats enterprises face today.

Take a look outside the security operations centers (SOC), and you’ll quickly see endless attack opportunities. A major culprit: cybersecurity fraud and brand impersonation. In the past 12 months, $42 billion has been lost to fraud – a number projected to grow more and more.

It’s clear that businesses need to take action against these threats if they want to protect their reputations and customer bases from being compromised. Let’s dive into what these threats are, and options to defend against them.

What is Cyber Fraud?

Cyber fraud is the deliberate use of technology to steal from, deceive or otherwise harm individuals or organizations. Cyber fraud can take many forms and its perpetrators are constantly finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities in systems and processes. Cybercriminals can target businesses directly by attempting to steal money or sensitive data.

What is Brand Impersonation?

Brand impersonation is when a fraudster impersonates a brand and uses the name of that brand to trick people into giving up their information. In this attack, a hacker creates a fake website that looks identical to the real thing. However, this website is actually designed to host malware or other malicious software. This software can then be used to steal data from visitors.

Two commons forms of brand impersonation are:

Domain squatting:

An actor simply registers a target’s predicted domain name before the target organization has a chance and holds onto it for a monetary or nefarious purpose.

Typosquatting:

An attacker registers a domain similar to the target domain in appearance, keyboard typo likelihood, or tweaked TLD, and skims traffic that people accidentally direct that way.

A subtle typo could lead the user to a malicious site, without them realizing it.

Animation shows dangers of typos in URLs

The Challenges of a Manual Defense

When it comes to fraud, detection and monitoring are your best plans for a counter-attack. To establish this defensive approach, your team will need to identify any suspicious domains: typos, wrong spellings and different top-level domains that could be targeting your site. Next, your team will need to regularly monitor all of these sites for any changes, from redirects to mimicking your organization’s site.

If this feels like an impossible task, that’s because it is – manually, at least. Hundreds of thousands of new domains are registered daily, so expecting your team to find all malicious domain matches to your enterprise is nearly impossible.

There are major challenges with a manual defense.

It Leads to Analyst Burnout: The mundane and time-consuming tasks required to monitor these threats can quickly become overwhelming for analysts. Not enough time, too many alerts, and a growing list of other threats quickly lead to analyst burnout.

It Lacks Visibility: There are only so many hours in a day. Your team is limited to what they can manually investigate, which leaves a large attack surface still unmonitored.

It Delays Incident Response: Malicious domains can be registered for months before a squatting attack goes live. Unless your analysts are watching a domain 24/7, there will be a delay in your incident response. This results in poor MMTD and MTTR.

How Automation Can Help

Manual cyber fraud detection and monitoring can be time-consuming, but with security automation, it’s much easier to fight back. Automation takes care of the heavy lifting by detecting and monitoring fraud, brand impersonation, typosquatting, and more.

How it Helps Analysts: Quickly automate detection and monitoring of any registered domains that match your customizable criteria

How it Expands Visibility: Automatically gather metadata and snapshots of malicious domain landing pages as changes occur.

How it Streamlines Incident Response: Case management capabilities provide clear and consistent incident context without manual digging

Use Case: Automate Against Domain Squatting & Typosquatting

With low-code security automation, you can automate domain squatting detection and monitoring to constantly watch any suspicious domains within customizable criteria. If any changes are made to these domain squatter sites, the automation platform will automatically gather snapshots and metadata for easier reporting. All of this data is stored within the platform’s case management capabilities for clear incident context.

See how the Swimlane low-code security automation platform can be used to monitor domain squatting.

Enable your security team to respond to cyber fraud and brand impersonation threats faster. Swimlane unlocks visibility to threats beyond the SOC for faster MTTD, MTTR, and reduced dwell time.

Learn more about domain squatting, typo squatting and homograph attacks.

Gartner: Create a SOC Target Operating Model to Drive Success

‘Security and risk management leaders often struggle to convey the business value of their security operations centers to non security leaders, resulting in reduced investment, poor collaboration and eroding support…’ — Access this Gartner SOC Operating Model report – courtesy of Swimlane.

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