Best Practices for Strong Digital Risk Protection


Best Practices for Strong Digital Risk Protection

Effective digital risk protection starts with full visibility across all internet-facing assets, including domains, subdomains, cloud resources, social profiles, mobile apps, and third-party integrations. Establish an authoritative inventory, classify asset criticality, and maintain ownership metadata. Implement continuous external monitoring to detect domain changes, certificate issues, exposed credentials, brand impersonation, phishing infrastructure, and policy drift. Configure alerting with clear thresholds and routing to reduce noise and ensure timely response.

Apply multi-factor authentication across administrative and high-risk user accounts, enforce strong authentication policies for third-party access, and regularly review privileges. Maintain tested incident response playbooks for account takeover, phishing, brand abuse, data leakage, and malware distribution, with predefined takedown and escalation procedures aligned to legal and platform requirements.

Measure performance with outcome-focused metrics: mean time to detect and remediate, takedown success rate and time, false positive rates, and coverage of monitored assets. Define SLAs for phishing and impersonation takedowns based on business impact and platform variability, and report ROI through loss-avoidance estimates tied to actual incidents and reduced exposure windows.

A commonly overlooked step is lifecycle governance of assets and integrations. Unmanaged or orphaned domains, legacy marketing microsites, stale DNS records, unused OAuth apps, and dormant vendor connections often persist outside formal ownership, expanding the attack surface. Establish join-change-leave processes for assets and vendors, periodic recertification of ownership and access, and decommissioning workflows that include DNS cleanup, certificate revocation, app store removal, and API key rotation. This closes gaps that monitoring alone may not catch and reduces long-term exposure.

Key Takeaways

  • Maintain an up-to-date inventory of digital assets, data flows, and third-party relationships to identify exposed surfaces and shadow IT. Use standardized classifications and ownership records to support accountability and risk assessment.
  • Monitor continuously for asset changes, certificate expirations, exposed services (e.g., open ports), and configuration drift. Configure automated, risk-prioritized alerts and ensure integration with ticketing and SIEM/SOAR for timely action.
  • Define clear takedown service-level agreements and detailed playbooks. Automate discovery, submission, and tracking of malicious or fraudulent domains, social accounts, and content, and verify remediation through independent validation.
  • Strengthen authentication by enforcing multi-factor authentication on high-risk systems and privileged accounts. Apply conditional access, least privilege, and regular access reviews to limit the impact of credential compromise.
  • Track effectiveness with measurable indicators such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), takedown cycle time, incident rate and severity trends, and adherence to policy and regulatory requirements. Validate improvements through periodic audits and post-incident reviews.

Mapping Your Digital Footprint

Before hardening defenses, map your digital footprint to understand what's exposed online. Inventory all websites, social profiles, cloud services, APIs, data stores, and mobile applications. Include third-party vendors and managed service providers, and document data flows and authentication methods.

Visualize the environment to identify externally reachable assets, misconfigurations, and shadow IT. Assess vendors’ security posture using standardized questionnaires, contract clauses, and available attestations (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001), and track findings over time.

Integrate results with threat and risk management processes, referencing applicable regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR for personal data in the EU, HIPAA for protected health information in the U.S.). Establish continuous monitoring for asset changes, certificate expirations, exposed ports, leaked credentials, and configuration drift.

Maintain an up-to-date inventory with clear ownership, classification, and business criticality. Prioritize remediation based on exploitability and impact. Document changes and exceptions, and feed insights into incident response and disaster recovery plans to ensure dependencies and recovery priorities are accurate.

Review and update the footprint regularly to reflect technology and organizational changes so that the security posture mirrors the actual environment.

Key Benefits: ROI Metrics

Digital Risk Protection (DRP) can provide measurable returns by reducing incident likelihood and impact. Early detection and takedown of exposed data and threats can lower breach risk and help mitigate the average cost of a data breach, which industry studies estimate at several million dollars per incident.

Continuous monitoring and automated alerting improve detection and response times, which can shorten downtime and limit operational and financial losses. Strengthened security controls and transparent practices can support customer trust and retention, which are linked to revenue performance.

DRP can also aid compliance by identifying policy violations and exposure of regulated data, potentially reducing fines and remediation costs. When these effects are combined—fewer successful attacks, faster recovery, improved customer metrics, and reduced compliance overhead—organizations can achieve a positive ROI, with some programs reporting returns of several multiples of investment depending on baseline risk, maturity, and implementation quality.

Takedown SLAS and Playbooks

To maintain the value of a Digital Risk Protection (DRP) program, organizations need consistent and timely removal of threats across the open, deep, and dark web. Define takedown SLAs that outline response times, escalation paths, required evidence, and decision criteria to contain threats such as phishing sites before they propagate.

Complement SLAs with concise playbooks that specify roles and responsibilities, legal and compliance steps, communication plans, and verification checks to ensure consistent execution. Review and update playbooks after each incident to incorporate lessons learned and reflect changes in attacker behavior, platforms, and regulations.

Use automation where feasible to detect, submit, and track takedown requests, integrate with ticketing systems, and collect audit trails. Metrics such as time to detect, time to submit, time to takedown, success rate by platform, and reappearance rates help assess performance and drive improvements.

Clear SLAs combined with automation and measurement reduce exposure windows, support regulatory compliance, and improve accountability across security, legal, and external partners.

What Is EBRAND’s Phishing Takedown?

EBRAND’s Phishing Takedown is a service that identifies and removes phishing sites targeting an organization’s brand, users, and assets. It continuously monitors domains, subdomains, and web pages for indicators of impersonation or malicious activity. When a threat is confirmed, EBRAND initiates a takedown process with hosting providers, registrars, and other relevant parties to disable the content, often achieving removal within hours depending on provider responsiveness and evidence requirements.

Key components include:

  • Detection: Ongoing surveillance for suspicious registrations, cloned websites, and phishing kits associated with the brand.
  • Verification: Triage and evidence collection to confirm malicious intent and prepare legally and procedurally compliant takedown requests.
  • Response: Coordinated engagement with infrastructure owners (e.g., ISPs, registrars, CDNs) to remove or disable the content and related assets.
  • Reporting: Visibility into phishing activity trends, attack vectors, and recurring infrastructure, supporting adjustments to email, web, and brand protection controls.
  • Compliance and risk management: Support for regulatory obligations related to data protection and incident response, and reduction of exposure to fraud and reputational harm.

The service is intended to reduce the time malicious sites remain active, limit user compromise, and inform broader security measures through trend analysis and operational insights.

Actual takedown speed varies by jurisdiction, provider policies, and the completeness of evidence submitted.

MFA Adoption Impact

Even modest increases in multi-factor authentication (MFA) adoption can materially reduce account-takeover risk.

Industry analyses indicate MFA can block the vast majority of automated credential attacks and is associated with significantly fewer compromised-account incidents. Prioritizing MFA for accounts that access sensitive data and critical systems typically yields rapid risk reduction relative to effort.

Adoption remains uneven: surveys in recent years show that only a minority of organizations have implemented MFA broadly across users and systems. Expanding coverage helps address a common Digital Risk Protection gap.

While actual breach costs vary by sector and region, average reported breach costs are high; preventing even a single incident can offset MFA deployment and administration costs.

MFA is most effective when integrated into a layered security program.

Combining MFA with risk-based access controls, continuous monitoring, and user security awareness training improves resilience against phishing, credential stuffing, and session hijacking while helping streamline access for legitimate users through adaptive policies.