Group-IB granted Innovation Excellence award for its Digital Risk Protection
Group-IB was granted Innovation Excellence award for its Digital Risk Protection (DRP), an Al-driven platform for identifying and mitigating digital risks and counteracting brand impersonation attacks with the company’s patented technologies at its core.
Innovation Excellence award honors companies that become leaders in Frost Radars. According to Group-IB estimates, the share of online fraud in the total number of online crimes has exceeded 50%, while social networks have established themselves as the main shelter for brand infringements.
The key parameters independently analyzed by Frost & Sullivan in its “Frost Radar: European Digital Risk Protection (DRP) Market, 2020” among others included innovation stability, R&D, mega trends leverage, growth pipeline, vision and strategy, revenue growth, and market share growth.
The report highlights that the digital transformation of businesses has introduced new security vulnerabilities beyond the network perimeter, namely brand impersonation attacks and online fraud.
The problem, the report notes, is compounded by the fact that cybersecurity analysts are frequently way too occupied with the protection of internal network to monitor the external environment for threats on a continuous basis, which determines the need for companies to use DRP solutions.
According to Group-IB’s estimates, online fraud accounted for 54% of all digital offenses between Q1 and Q3 2020. Online fraud is divided into two major categories: online scams that employ numerous tricks to have a user give their money voluntarily and phishing websites that steal user login credentials or bank card data. The share of the first category amounts to 38% of the total number of online crimes, while the second one stands at 16%.
The analysis of the latest fraud trends by Group-IB DRP analysts shows a shift toward the personalization and targeting of scams. For instance, threat actors target specific victim pool to increase conversion, use personalized links that can be opened only once and provide fraudsters with analytical data, e.g. data that is filled by users on a website can then be transmitted in the URL, and used at the next stage of fraud to pre-fill forms on websites with personalized content.
The above-mentioned trend is also reflected by the fact that for attracting web traffic, attackers increasingly rely on channels that enabling targeting and personalization.
The majority of users get trapped into online scams via online ads on social media, emails, direct messages on social media and direct messages in messengers. The personalization of scams considerably complicated the detection of online fraud and identification of attackers’ infrastructure and changed the requirements for DRP systems.
The innovativeness of Group-IB’s Digital Risk Protection stems from the fact that the platform employs the company’s patented technologies in the cyber threat intelligence field, including fully automated Graph Network Analysis, proved by over 30 patents worldwide.
Apart from correlating data and attributing attacks to specific criminal groups in seconds, graph technologies enable Group-IB to find other elements of the attackers’ infrastructure, e.g. domains that have been registered by the attacker but have no content so far or web pages that target other brands, which considerably enriches monitoring results.
The data of Group-IB DRP team shows that the majority of brand infringements (58%) are hiding behind fake groups and accounts on social media, fraudulent websites come second with 22%, while fake mobile apps got third place with 7%.
To successfully identify and classify various types of brand impersonation and fraud as well as to automate this painstaking process, Group-IB Digital Risk Protection applies neural networks and numerous scorings that are constantly being calibrated by Group-IB analysts. These algorithms have been developed as a result of DRP specialists’ long-standing experience in protecting over 350 brands globally.
“Headquartered in Singapore, Group‐IB has a strong presence in the European DRP market and enjoyed the highest share of 18.5% in 2019,” the Frost & Sullivan report says.
“It serves leading Fortune 500 companies as well as leading bitcoin exchanges in Europe <…> The company uses a combination of ML and human intelligence to detect, classify, and block malicious links while allowing legitimate sources. Its innovation capabilities and customer‐aligned product development strategies have contributed to a high customer renewal rate of approximately 96%.”
The high customer renewal percentage owes a great deal to Group-IB’s ability to mitigate detections of unlawful use of companies’ assets without going to court – the pre-trial takedown rate has been standing at 85% thanks to the three-stage response scheme.
As a first step, Group-IB notifies the owner of fraudulent infrastructure and relevant watchdogs of recorded violations. If the latter are not redressed, as a second step, Group-IB resorts to the wide networks of partners and allied agencies that can contribute to the infrastructure takedown.
At the final, the third stage, Group-IB engages expert analysts and lawyers who can obtain an official pre-trial order to take down the detected violation.
“Frost & Sullivan Innovation Excellence award is a big moment for DRP team and Group-IB in general,” comments Group-IB Deputy Director of Anti-Piracy and Brand Protection Dmitry Tiunkin.
“With a growing trend for the personalization and targeting of brand impersonating scams and online fraud, DRP solutions should be increasingly client-tailored. Group-IB’s Digital Risk Protection is a product that was built on a service and incorporated the expertise of DRP analysts, who are continuously enriching the product with the data on the latest fraud trends relevant for specific industries.
“DRP empowers its clients with a comprehensive management of the external digital risk landscape via a toolset for the monitoring of any infringements in real time.”