Protecting Brand Value with Cybersecurity – Yoav Keren, BrandShield

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with UF Karen whose CEO for brand shield and we're talking about how the cat and mouse game between cybersecurity professionals and the bad guys is evolving. You're welcome the show Thank you very much for having me. You guys of course are known for hunting threats and seems to me at least the bad guys are getting better at evading the techniques that we have to detect those threats.

So what's your sense of where are we as we head into 2023 or we went in or losing this? well, first of all, we're winning let's The bottom line we know how how to detect these threats and we know how to stop them but there's definitely it's an ongoing fight that will continue and to be more precise what we do a branches as a cyber security company. We provide a brighter in the Digital Risk protection, which is basically detecting digital threats that are external to the organization and we take them down.

We we stop them these these type of digital threats have been in growing significantly the past three years covid was a an accelerated but it happened even on related to that because it's just that the kind of the the what happens in the market and when I refer to these external digital threats what I mean are online scams fishing impersonation that happens also should we got one websites the sale of counterfeits all kind of a brand abused activities that happen online and it happened across different Industries. Where does this battle take place? Because if it takes place on my network, there's costs.

So is this a fight that's taking place on the internet somewhere on behalf of all of us or is this something that happens, you know once they're past my perimeter. Well, the the whole thing here is that it happens external to the perimeter of the organization. So and that's actually one of the problems.

So, you know, most of the the cisos of companies today, um deal with threats that are within their perimeter. It's on their Cloud on their servers on their on their Network. things that they control And that they can do something about all these threats.

I'm referring to these phishing websites social media Pages or posts or sales of products on on marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay they happen externally organization. If you don't monitor them proactively and if you don't act against them proactively there will they will hurt the the company the will will Target usually the customers the potential customers of the company or existing customers of the company providers employees. So definitely threat stack and he hit the the bottom line of a company and and we find that fight online on the internet our our technology basically grows the internet automatically to detect these potential threats whether these are websites or users or accounts on different social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or or a VK or whatever a social platform that you can think about online marketplaces mobile apps paid ads and so on and so on we use NLP artificial intelligence AI to analyze the content the images the logos everything around the the pages and and posts and and websites that we've detected the system basically gives us a risk score to identify the major threats finds networks of abuse clusters of websites that are attacking a certain brand of certain company and then our hunting team our enforcement team takes action using our a lot of automated tools that we have in the system in To take down these threats now, we do not attack anyone.

We basically report these potential abuses to the relevant service providers, which can be hosting providers registrars Registries the social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram marketers platforms and so on and so on. So how do you guys go about doing that? Because it seems like there's not enough people in the world to kind of do that manually.

So what's the techniques that you're using the find all these bad guys because they're countless number of these malicious websites and organized crimes indicates that are doing all kinds of things. Yeah, well, there's definitely dealing with this manually is not something that is reasonable. This is why we've developed our technology that is highly automated and basically what it does it it grows the the web with the very effectively and I would say specific.

We don't crawl the entire internet when we have when we Services Company our our technology crows the web to detect threats that are specific for that brand that product that we try to protect the system goes out there collects the the data about all these can be hundreds of thousands. Sometimes even millions of websites or social media Pages or Marketplace listings that are out there and then it runs automatically using AI machine learning big data to really identify and Analyze the content and the images and all the other parts of those those pages those online websites and pages and prioritize them automatically using our algorithms doing that manually is definitely something that is will take years for something that takes a few minutes or hours for our system to do. How good are the isps getting and responding to this information and how quickly can they do something meaningful the thought those guests?

Well, first of all, we we had cases where websites fishing or scams were taken down within minutes. Um, so so they if they want to they can be highly responsive and I'm talking about not only the the isps. This is also the platforms the social media platforms or or other platforms that we that we send the the takedown notices too.

Naturally. It's it's up to them. We can't force them.

But we do a lot of automation to kind of send enough information to when we submit that the system collects enough intelligence to really show them that this is a potential scam and we also submit it with additional documents to show that we represent the the relevant brand or company that we service so those Providers or isps or platforms see that and can react very quickly. I would say that compliance changes. It changes across countries.

It changes across platforms. We've seen the social media platforms that some some of them that have a very high compliance rate and real react quickly we've seen ones that without naming have declined over time, especially one of them this year, so It's really a matter of how how collaborative there are but we on our end. We don't stop and we we keep pushing and keep following up and providing them with the with the right information.

So so they take it down. So we get to very very high success rate. Usually when you're talking about online scams of fishing.

This is close to 100% like over 99% over time the I would say that the average when when you look at on an online scam or fishing the average thing down time would be less than 24 hours in a few hours. Usually that's that's where we are. There's one more thing that we're doing that helps some kind of mitigate the risk and this is we notify.

Um, this is a part of our service. Of course. It's a it's part of that customers need to subscribe to To we notify the relevant.

Browsers and search engines and the antiviruses anti spans and so on of a certain fishing or scan website and that what they do is they block it. So we call it a blocking service. They basically block this to their customers.

I'm sure you you've encounted cases where you browsed and even even Chrome or one of the other popular browsers give you know notification. It kind of a red alert that this is this is a bad website. This is the type of blocks that it creates and that mitigates to risk for most most users.

So this is definitely something that can happen very quickly. What is your sense of law enforcement these days are they get? A let me try that again.

What's your sense of how good are the law enforcement agencies that helping kind of mitigate some of these attacks and getting to the folks who are actually behind all these attacks. But from from our experience, this is the at the the bottom of interest for for law enforcement. Well, I'm sure many of them are you know, this is something that they might care about but they have so many other things on their plate whether you start from, you know terrorism and then, you know, a drugs and and other you know, elicit activities that that happen or you know, real crime that happens that is involved and happens online what we've seen that is this is not something that gets enough attention by law enforcement.

And in the sense. This is why we are there to help our customers, you know, even if it gets to enforcement the the time until this is something really happens and the evidence that needs to to be collected. You know, we'll we'll cost a lot and we'll take a lot of time many of our customers are small companies and medium-sized companies and it cannot wait for fishing sites or scan site or for counterfeits to be sold online which which hurts their bottom line and it just stop it.

So this is our our help here basically helps stopping pushing pushing them away. Stop these activities from happening online and that's much faster. How aggressive our organizations getting about the bending themselves because some people say the best defense is a good offense and we hear a lot of debates about just how much organizations should be going after these folks.

What's your sense of what's going on? well I think that more and more companies today more more cisos today understand that having a Digital Risk protection solution is is something that is a crucial. It has become a mission critical which it wasn't before.

If you go back a few years ago. This is something that again the the change the covid everyone moved more to to get more services online. We've been become more and more aware of these threats and the same thing happened for the scammers.

They've they've moved more online in our more active. So so this is I we do see an increase there's still a lot to go. There's still a lot of companies that are not aware both on the threats, but also the fact that there are solutions out there to protect them from these threats and to solve the problem, but you do see a lot Of Interest growing and I you know, we I can say about our company specifically we tripled in the past two years.

So it's a really, you know a big change and I think this is going to continue in the next coming years. So what's your best advice to folks? What's that one thing that you kind of wish everybody would?

Appreciate more about how to defend themselves and I guess you know, what's your ultimate Pete? Well, I think that if when you say folks, do you do you refer to companies see shows? Uh, well, I think that um csos need to look at this risk protection as a part of their overall protection overall Protection Program, the they have a lot of Solutions in many cases that cover the perimeter.

They're internal Network. This is something that is kind of a blind spot for most relatively. It's it's not not to expensive to protect against these these threats the damages can be huge both commercially on the bottom line, but also in terms of reputation and NPR disasters, we've been we've seen this across happening to Lot of companies and I think this should be you know, kind of a part of the of the day-to-day solutions that every company has.

All right. Well military folks will tell you the most important thing about any wars to make sure the battles are fought somewhere other than your own territory you have thanks for being on the show. Thank you very much for having me.

All right back to you guys in the studio.