The company
Headquartered in London, England, this client is a non-ministerial department of the UK
Government. Formed in 2015, the key responsibilities of this department are the collection
of taxes, distribution of state support and fulfilment of the national minimum wage, among
other regimes.
The Challenges
The client approached CYJAX to act as an OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) team, with a focus on online brand misuse and reputational damage control. As a government agency impacted by legislation, the internal team have restrictions on how it can conduct investigations into brand misuse and therefore requires an outside organisation to do so on its behalf.
As well as this, the small size of the department meant they didn’t have the
capacity to further investigate some threats and needed outside support to deal with the demand.
The Goals
The client required assistance in identifying and eliminating cases of brand misuse online, typically via social media, forums, text messages and other private messaging applications.
There are a number of different types of brand misuse that impact this government department, including the use of the brand name to scam the general public, SMS phishing, charging a premium for free services, sensitive information being broadcast during procurement and the spread of malware through false web links.
Many of these cases not only caused damage to the brand but came at the expense of the general public who often had their private and financial information accessed or paid for unnecessary services.
The Solution
The CYJAX team stepped in deploying its platform Cymon®, combined with its analyst team to investigate such cases of someone wrongly acting on behalf of the client. The solution surfaced evidence and actionable intelligence to ensure the correct mitigation steps were being taken to pursue prosecutions and/or remove digital footprints, depending on the
circumstances.
CYJAX was constantly analysing digital intelligence for cases of brand misuse, setting up their technology to alert them to particular intelligence related to the client on the likes of Instagram, Facebook and public forums. The intelligence discovered by the solution was qualified before delivery which meant that the client’s internal team would only receive actionable intelligence rather than the noise of lots of irrelevant data.
This solution allowed the team to act quickly when a person or company wrongly claimed the brand name. As well as utilising public web data on social media websites, the Cymon® platform was able to infiltrate private encrypted applications to uncover more hidden cases of brand misuse, as well as uncovering SMS phishing scams.
The team provided holistic, evidence-based reports on how the brand was being misrepresented online, as well as an analysis of the next steps of the investigation. All reports were delivered through their online platform, Cymon®, utilising meaningful, actionable intelligence to ensure the correct steps were taken in shutting down threats against the brand.
In some cases, the course of action would be to seek prosecution whereas others would require the team to contact the server to remove the web page or social media profile.
The Result
- Daily delivery of intelligence reports and analysis into brand misuse with a constant.
- Enablement of a ticketing system that allowed the client to request thorough.
- Limitation of significant reputation damage, which is a significant risk that comes from brand misuse of well-established organiastions
- Reducing alert fatigue by streamlining the reporting process, ensuring only.
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