Your brand is everywhere — on your website, across social media, in app stores, on marketplaces, in search results, and even tucked away in dark web forums. All that visibility is great for growth, but it also paints a big target on your back.
Scammers, counterfeiters, and cybercriminals know that if they can look like you online, they can trick your customers, damage your reputation, and walk away with money or data. That’s why many security operations centers (SOCs) now include brand protection as part of their core mission.
Just like the SOC watches your internal network for suspicious activity, they also keep an eye on the outside world to spot threats to your brand before they land in your customers’ inboxes or search results. The intel they collect flows right into your threat intelligence feeds, giving your security team the full picture.
So, what does brand protection actually look like in action?
1. Hunting for Brand Threats Everywhere
Brand protection starts with relentless monitoring, both inside and outside your digital perimeter. On the “outside” side of the job, that means scanning for threats across:
- Websites and domains – Phishing sites, fake login pages, typo-squatted domains
- Social media – Fraudulent accounts pretending to be your brand, executives, or employees
- Marketplaces and e-commerce – Counterfeit products, unauthorized sellers
- App stores – Malicious or fraudulent apps using your name or logo
- Dark web forums and leak sites – Stolen data, credentials, or IP for sale
With automation and AI-powered scanning, the SOC can process millions of potential signals and quickly separate the noise from the real threats – feeding only the verified, actionable intel into their systems.
2. Preventing Customer Fraud Before It Spreads
Many brand abuse campaigns are designed to trick customers into:
- Logging into a fake website
- Downloading a malicious app
- Sending money to a scammer posing as a company rep
When the SOC spots these threats early, they can move fast to contain them, whether that’s by taking down the malicious content, blocking traffic, or alerting impacted customers. Acting early can mean preventing hundreds or even thousands of potential victims.
3. Removing the Threat
Once identified, removing a brand threat is rarely a one-team job. While the SOC may detect and validate it, takedown often involves collaboration across multiple departments:
- Legal – To issue trademark or copyright enforcement notices and make sure the action is compliant with regional laws
- Trust & Safety or Customer Support – To manage customer-facing communication if needed
- Marketing and PR – To help control narrative if the incident is public
- External partners – Such as hosting providers, registrars, or social platforms that must act on removal requests
The SOC typically coordinates this process, ensuring that all stakeholders move quickly and in sync. Automation can handle much of the submission and tracking, but the human coordination across teams is what makes takedowns fast and thorough. The goal is to minimize the time a threat is live, because every extra hour can mean more victims and more damage.
4. Protecting Intellectual Property
The SOC’s brand protection work also covers safeguarding trademarks, copyrighted material, and other brand assets. This includes:
- Catching unauthorized use of logos, taglines, or creative assets
- Identifying counterfeit goods in e-commerce channels
- Working with legal teams to ensure fast, consistent enforcement
For global brands, this also means navigating IP rules across multiple countries.
5. Powering Threat Intelligence with External Data
Because brand protection is built into the SOC, it’s not a siloed activity. Every verified threat from outside the perimeter (e.g. a malicious domain, a compromised social account, a stolen data dump, etc.) becomes part of the organization’s threat intelligence.
That’s where the value multiplies. A malicious domain flagged by brand protection might connect directly to phishing emails already hitting inboxes. A compromised social account might be part of the same infrastructure used in a recent malware campaign. The SOC can connect those dots faster when they own both sides of the picture.
6. What Makes a Brand Protection Function Effective
It comes down to the right mix of skills and tools.
Skills:
- Threat analysis and OSINT
- Digital forensics
- IP law and enforcement processes
- Fast, clear cross-team communication
Tools:
- AI-driven brand monitoring platforms
- Automated takedown systems
- Domain and DNS monitoring
- Dark web monitoring and leak detection
The combination lets the SOC go from detection to resolution in minutes, not days.
Why It Matters More Than Ever
Brand abuse is getting faster, more sophisticated, and more convincing, especially with AI lowering the barrier for attackers. And because many campaigns now start outside your network, you can’t afford to treat “external” threats as someone else’s problem.
When the SOC owns brand protection, they can watch the inside and outside in one continuous picture — feeding external threat intelligence into internal detection, and stopping attacks before they connect.
If you want to see how AI-powered brand protection can fit seamlessly into your SOC’s workflows and threat intelligence feeds, get in touch with Bolster today.
