Inside Mimecast’s The State Of Brand Protection 2021
Top Business Tech takes a closer look at Mimecast’s The State Of Brand Protection 2021, which examines the drastic rise of online brand impersonation and how companies can better defend themselves.
Mimecast’s latest research, The State of Brand Protection 2021 (SOBP), is based on the billions of emails that it monitors on behalf of its customers. The outbreak of COVID-19 has provided a wealth of opportunities for cybercriminals to infiltrate organisations. One of the most rapidly growing criminal behaviours is brand impersonation. Mimecast reports that in the final months of 2020, the 100 most valuable brands globally were impersonated around 715,600 emails per month. This places even more emphasis on the need for users to educate themselves on phishing attacks, as the number of user clicks on unsafe email URLs was 84.5% higher in January 2021 than January 2020.
An accelerating threat
According to Mimecast, over 27 million brand impersonations emails per month were detected en route to the software company’s customers in 2020, marking an evident increase in threats during the virus outbreak.
When brand impersonation was about bootleg products, there was a time identifiable by shoddy stitchwork or a wonky logo on a physical effect. Still, brand impersonation has gone digital evolved beyond far easy recognition. It has adopted even more agility in the digital age. Mimecast’s report found that no company was exempt from this threat; B2Bs and B2Cs were vulnerable to such exploitation. In most cases, organisations were not aware that cybercriminals were impersonating them online. This threat is possible at any digital touchpoint, from texts and emails to social media outlets and job adverts.
READ MORE:
- Mimecast’s 5 steps to stop brand impersonation
- ServiceNow delivers new security integrations with Microsoft
- Microsoft and Darktrace join forces to provide self-learning AI cybersecurity to users
- What can corporates learn from digital transformation in the COVID era?
Taking a proactive approach
Mimecast’s report outlines a five-point strategy to assist marketing and security teams in collaborating to develop a brand safety strategy that can meet evolving threats head-on.
Click here to read Mimecast’s 5 steps to stop brand impersonation.
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