What is Digital Risk Protection?
Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is the strategic use of tools and services designed to assess, monitor, and mitigate risk across an organization’s digital footprint, such as the deep and dark web, social media platforms, and other online ecosystems. These services aim to protect organizations from a range of cyber threats including data breaches, brand impersonation, phishing attacks, and exposure of sensitive information. DRP solutions help reduce the risk of digital attacks by proactively addressing vulnerabilities and responding to risks before they evolve into full-scale incidents.
What are the 7 Digital Risks?
The seven common digital risks that Digital Risk Protection solutions typically address include:
- Data Leakage: The exposure of sensitive or confidential data on unmonitored platforms, often through unauthorized access or human error.
- Phishing Attacks: Attempts to steal credentials or personal data by posing as legitimate entities in emails, websites, or social media messages.
- Brand Impersonation: Fraudsters creating fake websites or social media profiles that imitate a company to deceive customers or employees.
- Social Engineering: Manipulating individuals into divulging confidential information through deception, often via social media or email.
- Executive Threats: Targeted attacks or defamation attempts against high-profile company executives, often through spear-phishing or online harassment.
- Dark Web Exposure: Cybercriminals selling stolen data, credentials, or intellectual property on the dark web or deep web marketplaces.
- Third-Party Risk: Threats originating from third-party vendors or partners that may expose your organization to data breaches or other vulnerabilities.
How Does Digital Risk Protection Help?
Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is essential, as it helps identify and mitigate risks that standard security tools often miss, such as data leaks, brand impersonation, and threats emerging from the dark web or social media. By providing proactive monitoring and response, DRP ensures that organizations can protect their digital assets, reputation, and sensitive information from evolving cyber threats.
The primary benefits of DRP include:
- Proactive Threat Detection: DRP solutions provide continuous monitoring across digital platforms to detect threats early, reducing the risk of surprise attacks.
- Brand and Reputation Protection: By tracking mentions of your brand on social media, websites, and forums, DRP helps prevent impersonation and malicious use of your company’s name, which can damage your reputation.
- Data Leak Prevention: DRP tools can identify exposed credentials, intellectual property, or other sensitive data on the dark web or other unmonitored parts of the internet.
- Regulatory Compliance: DRP services can assist organizations in meeting regulatory requirements by identifying and addressing risks to sensitive customer data or intellectual property.
- Comprehensive Visibility: DRP solutions offer visibility into a broad range of external digital threats that traditional security tools might miss, such as social media risks or phishing attacks targeted at employees.
- Cost-Effective Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating risks early reduces the likelihood of costly incidents such as data breaches, which can result in financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties.
Digital Risk Protection Tools + Limitations
DRP tools leverage cyber threat intelligence to identify vulnerabilities, open ports, stolen credentials, and more. From coverage of potential social media threats to extensive Deep and Dark Web capabilities, digital risk protection solutions have a variety of strengths.
Digital risk protection tools enable security analysts and threat researchers to:
- Cyber exposure mitigation: Use actionable data, alerting, and remediation workflows to quickly mitigate threats.
- Digital footprinting: Understand which assets belong to their organization or might be impersonating their organization.
- Threat landscape and hunting: Identify active campaigns against their organization or industry sector.
- Company and brand protection: Discover malicious actors impersonating their brand or targeting their executives.
The challenge of digital risk protection solutions is that these tools for reducing exposure and driving remediation don’t focus on the strategic end of the security spectrum. Digital risk protection tools tend to focus on short-term exposure mitigation rather than proactive, long-term performance management context, developing cybersecurity standards, and implementing cybersecurity best practices.
Adding Power To Digital Risk Protection
Digital risk protection (DRP) solutions can be powerful tools for addressing cyber risk and ensuring cybersecurity protection. Yet, because DRP solutions don’t always focus on long-term performance management, they can be inadequate at helping organizations to improve their overall security posture. DRP tools are more tactical than strategic in nature — and often do not provide the necessary context to make informed business decisions.
Bitsight for Security Performance Management offers tools that can complement other digital risk protection solutions. By helping security leaders better understand performance over time, Bitsight makes it easier to allocate limited resources to the areas of greatest need, take steps to improve overall security posture, and achieve measurable risk reduction.
