Akamai Brand Protector defends against phishing attacks and fake websites

At RSA Conference 2023, Akamai Technologies unveiled Brand Protector, a new solution that detects and disrupts phishing sites, fake stores, and brand impersonations.

Brand Protector enables organizations to retain and grow customer loyalty while minimizing loss, drops in productivity and bad customer feedback.

According to Google, over 50,000 new phishing websites are created every week. Akamai Brand Protector inspects trillions of digital activities a day across both internal and external sources to discover abuse of an organization’s brand — often before an attack campaign launches.

This shields businesses from revenue loss and increased risk by combating fake goods sales, phishing sites and unauthorized use of brand elements outside of its environment and across the internet.

Brand Protector addresses the problem of fraudulent impersonations with a four-step approach:

• Intelligence: As the distributed edge and cloud platform, our proprietary view across the worldwide web traffic analyzes over 600 TB of data a day. The depth of intelligence in Brand Protector is enhanced with third-party data feeds for holistic visibility into attacker actions everywhere.
• Detection: Today’s brand attacks automate the deployment of malicious, short-lived websites. Akamai Brand Protector traces live traffic to detect brand abuse often before a phishing campaign begins – instead of relying on refreshed lists or delayed feeds. The outcome reduces attack impact, protecting customers and brand trust.
• Visibility: Customer-centric design gives security teams vital security insight in a single dashboard view. After receiving intelligence, data signals are run through a series of heuristic and AI detectors. Akamai’s simplified user interface provides an instant understanding of real-time threats to customers via impersonations. Findings are ranked by threat score and users click into an alert to view analyzed threat data including confidence score, severity rating, number of affected users and a timeline of attack events.
• Mitigation: Integrated takedown services help close the loop to combat brand fraud. Brand Protector enables security teams to issue a takedown request of the abusive site right in the detection screen. Takedown requests for Brand Protector automatically attach the detection’s evidence and supporting details for ease of use.

“Attackers are increasingly abusing trusted brand names to lure end-users through phishing and fake sites for the promise of financial gain,” said Rupesh Chokshi, SVP and GM, Application Security at Akamai.

“Detecting the rapid deployment of these attack campaigns and mitigating them can be a challenge for global brands. Brand Protector retains customer loyalty and revenue by addressing these external attack campaigns before they can gain momentum,” Chokshi concluded.