Media and Technology

Online Protection for Brands

Safeguarding brand identities, reputations, and revenues online.

Piracy and loss of digital assets are pressing issues for media and technology brands. But they are also vulnerable to other forms of abuse in an increasingly online world.

90% of consumers buy from brands they follow on social media, and chances are they are also buying their product, subscription, or service plan online. As trusted online identities, media, technology, and telecoms brands are targets for imitation. Fraudsters exploit consumer familiarity with media channels and online utilities to elicit payment details, while familiar brand material may lead consumers to trust a website or illicit IPTV platform.

Brand reputations, consumer relationships, and revenues are all at stake, as counterfeit and imitation pervade an increasingly online world.

Appropriation of brand identity and assets builds credibility and consumer confidence in online impersonators and infringers. And these online criminals are inventive. They cybersquat on similar, familiar domain names and hijack keywords on search engines, diverting traffic to their websites and away from brands. Revenues and reputations suffer, as consumers are subject to fraudulent scams and the online selling of counterfeits.

Sophisticated online foes are damaging brands, revenues, and reputations.

Online adversaries fake endorsements using brand names or assets to create false associations. They impersonate on social media to redirect customers, endorse counterfeits, or coopt online influencers, and use marketplaces to sell counterfeits. Fraudsters are equally smart, pivoting attacks to exploit trends. So phishing attacks, which often target service providers, increasingly use mobile voice and SMS attacks, to augment more familiar email scams.

OpSec offers a robust defense against imitation, fraud, and counterfeit selling.

  • Countering online fakes and trade diversion.
    OpSec monitors hundreds of marketplaces for infringements, from regional sellers to leading sites. We also take down sites that imitate legitimate sellers, delist search ads that point to fakes, and monitor app stores for imitation store fronts. Trade diversion is a particular issue for technology products. We help identify legitimate goods that are appearing in unauthorized channels or markets and monitor online pricing.

  • Fighting brand impersonation and fraud.
    We discover brand impersonation across a wide range of channels, detecting both brand imitation and fraudulent attacks. From websites to social media, we monitor for misuse of brand identity or assets, identifying infringing adverts and domains that could likely be used for imitation. An Early Warning System detects infringing domain or security certificate registrations to flag potential threats early.

  • Tackling unauthorized non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
    As leading brands and media properties seek new ways to grow and monetize, there is a greater risk of their intangible assets being misappropriated. One example is non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that tokenize products, properties, and media. By combining text based and visual artificial intelligence, we discover a wider range of infringements, achieving a typical takedown rate of around 90% for unauthorized NFTs.

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Our Approach

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