Celebrating a Year of Innovation with Akamai Brand Protector

The incidence of brand impersonation, a formidable challenge in the digital world, has seen an alarming rise, with the Federal Trade Commission identifying business impersonators as the top fraud category in 2023. The staggering 72% increase in reported losses to business impersonators — the total of which climbed to US$752 million — highlights the urgent need for robust defense mechanisms.

As the core of Akamai's cybersecurity suite, Brand Protector is a proactive partner against such threats. It empowers businesses to proactively detect and mitigate impersonation attempts, ensuring the integrity of their brand and the trust of their customers. By safeguarding against impersonation, Brand Protector not only protects a brand's reputation but also shields its customers from deceitful interactions that could erode confidence and loyalty.

If you are a leader in security for a global corporation, you might view disrupting phishing as a relatively minor task. Yet, allowing impersonation and customer fraud attempts to go unchecked not only emboldens attackers by increasing their incentives, but also reduces their perceived risk of retaliation.

Our threat researchers have observed brand impersonations being employed as a tactic for credential harvesting, which can then be leveraged in large-scale account abuse attacks. This demonstrates that the security risks associated with impersonation across websites, social media, and applications can lead to substantial financial repercussions. Brand Protector directly addresses this critical issue by offering a comprehensive suite of tools designed to detect and neutralize such threats, which effectively prevent their escalation.

The Abuse and Fraud Team has integrated valuable new capabilities into Brand Protector, including Google-safe browsing alerts, submitting your own URL for fraud analysis, social media monitoring, and rogue app monitoring, which extend the customer’s control over the use of their brand and products.

This new mitigation action complements our existing takedown requests, allowing users to disrupt traffic heading to malicious URLs, which reduces the risk of victimization even if the takedown request encounters obstacles​​.

In a response to customer requests, Brand Protector now allows security teams to submit URLs or domains for analysis by our AI-powered detection cloud, which provides an added layer of proactive defense​​.

With the rise of brand impersonation on social media, our enhanced social media monitoring capability now detects and neutralizes online fraud and protects your brand and its customers on various platforms​​.

This new feature scans official and unofficial app repositories to detect deceptive applications that misuse brand identity to comprehensively defend across the digital landscape​​.

As we celebrate a year of protecting brands with Brand Protector, we invite you to experience its new capabilities for yourself. Akamai's commitment to innovation ensures that Brand Protector evolves continuously to provide the most effective defense against brand impersonation and fraud.