Thinking outside the box: Why tracking your digital risk matters

Thinking outside the box: Why tracking your digital risk matters

Cybercrime has become a vast industry – so vast that if it were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest economy, according to Cybercrime Magazine’s Cyberwarfare in the C-Suite. Unlike traditional crime, which is limited by physical boundaries and risks, cybercrime thrives in the connected world, where it can be more covert and far-reaching.

This blog discusses why digital risk protection should be a crucial element in your cybersecurity strategy and explores how everyone can contribute to a safer digital landscape.

Understanding your attack surface

Cybersecurity has focused mainly on the systems within an organisation's control to this point. However, a comprehensive view of risks and threats must extend to the broader digital landscape, capturing what happens beyond our walls and outside our control.

Effective digital risk protection involves detecting digital risks and deploying countermeasures to protect against rogue digital assets – those components associated with your digital estate but outside of your control or ownership. This includes social media profiles – either of your employees or fake business accounts created by malicious actors – and spoofed URLs or email addresses, all of which represent a substantial cybersecurity threat.

Cybercriminals use these various techniques with one common goal — to exploit the success of a company’s digital assets and to take advantage of unwitting users, employees or customers. Microsoft reports that 150 new domains are registered every minute and that business email compromise costs businesses just over $4.5k per minute, so it’s easy for hackers to hide in the noise. Orange Cyberdefense has taken down over 100,000 malicious websites over the past three years.

Social media: A hacker’s new best friend 

Consider this case study: We manage 24/7 security for a large multinational bank. Recently, attackers targeted the bank’s employees via LinkedIn, impersonating recruiters from a rival bank. After building trust, the attackers directed employees to Discord, which the ‘recruiters’ said was a more private platform, where they requested CV uploads. Because this task couldn’t be completed on their phones, the employees switched to their laptops, unwittingly allowing the attackers access to their and their employers’ data.

The problem that was exploited here? Social media can’t be governed by a company, despite it being a potential way into their digital estate. With limited oversight and enforcement from any central authority, it’s challenging for businesses to control assets or respond effectively to risks posed by such external platforms. This gap is where Orange Cyberdefense steps in.

Orange Cyberdefense to the rescue

Our CybersSOC quickly detected this targeted attack as soon as it reached the employees’ laptops. Leveraging our threat intelligence, we identified signs that there was a known group behind the attack, we alerted the customer, and the attack was shut down. The customer was also able to educate employees about the role they each play in mitigating cyber risks. Imagine what might have happened if this customer didn’t have 24/7 security monitoring. 

In this instance, there would be very little the customer would have been able to do had the attack gone further as it’s hard to blame one party. Would the competitor bank be to blame as their name was used in the attack? Would it be the unwitting employees or the social media company? Ultimately, everyone has to play their part in tackling these threats so businesses need to put some effort into cataloguing these rogue digital assets as much as they should catalogue their legitimate internet-facing assets. 

The solution is using a Digital Risk Protection service for your digital estate to identify attacks early and respond as fast as possible.  

How can we disrupt attacks earlier?

●    Adding external digital risk detection capabilities
●    Complementing traditional “internal” SecOps with a view from the outside
●    Having a comprehensive visibility of the Open, Deep and Dark Web
●    Disrupting attacker infrastructure and securing data

AI-assisted human investigation
At Orange Cyberdefense, we combine AI-powered tools with human intelligence to continuously monitor, pre-filter, confirm and prioritise threats. This hybrid approach enables quicker, more accurate responses and effective countermeasures.

By sharing stories from the field about brand exploitation and exposed data, we hope to underscore the importance of making digital risk protection a priority in your cybersecurity strategy. It’s crucial to understand both your full scope of digital assets and their rogue equivalents set up by your adversaries to defend effectively.

Learn more about how Orange Cyberdefense can support your digital risk journey here .