The Allianz Risk Barometer classifies cyberattacks consistently as one of the top risks and communicators are increasingly required to support and potentially lead efforts to protect their organizations. Cybercrime can include sophisticated Disinformation-as-a-Service (DaaS) attacks, targeted attacks to obtain sensitive or personal data, industrial espionage, and more. The reputational damage and financial losses can be disastrous as a single attack can easily surpass the estimated average cost of about $4 million and cause 60% of small organizations to go out of business.
With more than half of the content found within the Dark Web being potentially harmful to organizations, and as ransomware attacks have grown by 62% since 2019 alone, communicators need to acquire a new skill: Cyber Resilience. In other words, to protect their brand’s reputation, communication and marketing teams need to implement holistic strategies and tactics to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber incidents. For more info, see our earlier post “Cyber Resilience: A Must-Have Skill for Communicators“.
Many communicators, however, struggle to implement effective cyber resilience programs which are typically caused by a lack of access to relevant tools, data, and insights. This is where Plotlights comes in.
Brand Protection with Plotlights
The Plotlights platform seamlessly integrates Media Intelligence and Threat Intelligence, provides our clients with insights into their brand’s risk landscape, and informs brand protection and risk mitigation strategies.
Corporate communicators, PR experts, and marketers use the Plotlights platform to consistently scan a broad variety of channels and environments such as Telegram, Signal, Reddit, Discord, and the Dark Web for actionable data on developing risks. These insights help to safeguard the brand’s reputation, keep executives and colleagues safe, fight disinformation and Dark PR. Clients also use the Plotlights platform to scan for signals around fraud, IP theft, sale of credentials, vouchers, and to prevent cyberattacks in the first place.
The Plotlights platform delivers:
- Mentions – With Plotlights communication teams catch any mentions of their brands, products, or executives within the Dark Web and follow related discussions once they move on to other channels such as Discord, Telegram, Signal, or Reddit – all within one dashboard.
- Content Danger Score – Dark Web content can be difficult to understand as it is often highly technical data or written in Mandarin or Russian. That’s why we developed the ‘Content Danger Score’.
Plotlights analyzes every mention in an automated fashion and assigns a score to every single piece of content. This score indicates how likely it is that this content may be used for criminal activity.
This way, communicators can easily and quickly understand risks and threats. The Content Danger Score is based on a machine-learning algorithm that works with over 100 independent decision variables. These variables include metadata (such as domains, URLs, and languages), patterns (such as social security numbers, or credentials), attribute metrics (such as the number of credit cards and email addresses) as well as many positive and negative terms, for example, hack or 0-day. No single variable is responsible for the final score. The Content Danger Score rating scale is from 1% to 100% where 1% may indicate low risk and 100% may indicate a high-risk level.
- Reputation Risk Index (organization level) – The Reputation Risk Index is essentially a cyber risk scoring tool where increasing scores may correlate to heightened risk. The Reputation Risk Index is a metric to measure and understand your organization’s risk coming from the Dark Web. This index is also a great benchmarking tool for rating organizations based on the extent and severity of their respective Dark Web exposure. Fluctuations in scores over time may indicate progress in improving an organization’s resilience, or alert about possible risks to the brand and reputation such as breaches or data leaks. Plotlights focuses on specific sources for unique matches of our clients’ websites and email domains and adjusts the results based on the respective Content Danger Score. The Content Danger Score is a key ingredient to the Reputation Risk Index as it removes any irrelevant mentions. For overall relevance and result quality, Plotlights differentiates between mentions with and without a higher Content Danger Score as not every piece of content found on the Dark Web is problematic. More recent mentions (within the last 90 days) are given the most weight since such breaches or data leaks containing an organization’s proprietary information are more useful to bad actors, and counter strategies and tactics may have not yet been deployed by communication or digital security teams. The Reputation Risk Index is fully privacy-compliant as only websites and email domains are used to calculate it.
- Reputation Risk Index (industry level) – Plotlights is currently developing Reputation Risk Indices for all major industries. Results will highlight the comparative risk levels of industries but will also help individual organizations and communication teams to benchmark their own efforts against their wider context of the respective industry or set of competitors.
- Many additional metrics – There are many additional metrics to help clients understand the risks their organizations are facing which include mentions over time, distribution of mentions over various networks, and, of course, language distribution. Clients can also monitor entire industries or their competitors. This will help them assess their own organization’s risk and will also inform risk mitigation strategies.
- Media Intelligence – Plotlights supports clients in protecting and building their brands. This is where our Media Intelligence offering comes in. We deliver all essential communication, PR, and content-related metrics, including monitoring and analytics of newer platforms such as TikTok and Substack, and support communication efforts across all PESO channels: paid, earned, owned, and shared. On top of our own Media and Threat Intelligence data, Plotlights works with many leading data providers, such as online search authority MOZ data to support our clients’ SEO success with domain authority, spam score, backlink data, and more. Check out one of our disinformation dashboards to get an impression of what Plotlights can offer.
- Let our Cyber Analyst team support you: We know that many communicators are just getting started with their Threat Intelligence efforts. Let our team of experienced media and threat analysts help you get the most of all the intelligence you are gathering.
- Risk Research – Plotlights clients have full (and secure) access to all of their mentions and can deep dive into understanding the specifics of any risk. Here is a snippet view of mentions which can all be accessed in detail:
Experience first-hand how the first fully-integrated Media Intelligence and Threat Intelligence platform can build and protect your brand. Reach out to us today!
