(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) I am one of you. I have been in the marketing field for more than 20 years and have seen unimaginable technology shifts that have made the world a more connected and efficient digital machine. With this great opportunity, there also comes great risk if your company is not protecting itself from digital risks.
Everyone knows about the brands that have been breached. Breaches have become so common that we are all getting tired of hearing about it.
As marketing leaders, we are all brand stewards for our company and our customers. We need to do everything we can to make our customers love us and trust us. We could do 99.999 per cent of things right, but with one simple "we've been hacked" experience, it could wreck it all. As I have learned over the years, the best way to help customers and businesses is to tell them real customer stories that they can relate to as they share the same pain and concerns: here are some customer stories that are 100 per cent real that every marketing leader should know about as these digital risks are your risks.
We found malicious website domains that look like the real brand: By monitoring for registrations of domains that appear to look similar to a well-known brand's website, a spoof domain was discovered. The domain had been registered overnight, swapping a 'rn' for an 'm' so it looked exactly like the brand's .com website. The content was an exact mirror of the client's legitimate site and, aside from lacking some functionality of the legitimate site, appeared genuine to the casual user. The goal of the fake website was to fool unsuspecting users into entering in their usernames and passwords. Brand damage successful.
The good news is with effective digital risk management, you can identify these fake websites, and take them down before fraud is conducted against your customers.
Fake social media profiles that are indistinguishable from your real brand: By monitoring social media profiles for a very large customer, we discovered that more than 500 fake social media profiles that were hijacking their brand. Some of the profiles looked so legitimate that the company was amazed by how close the cyber criminals came to replicating their legitimate social media site that even some employees could not determine if it was real or not. Brand damage successful.
The good news is with effective digital risk management, fake social media profiles can be quickly identified and taken offline.
Your customers unknowingly using fake mobile applications taking advantage of their privacy: By monitoring official app stores, a malicious app impersonating their brand was detected. Analysis of this malicious app revealed that it had spyware capabilities and could steal information from its users. Brand damage successful.
The good news is that with effective digital risk management, the company was provided with an overview of the risks associated with the mobile application, screenshots of the application, and critically the ability to have the malicious app removed from the store.
These are just three real stories that had the potential to impact consumers and the brands they trust. There are hundreds more examples of brand exposure that you as a marketing leader must learn more about. It is not my intention to scare you but to educate you on what is going on right now, today, this very minute.
The writer is chief marketing officer of Digital Shadows. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policies.
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