As a majority of The Economist’s revenue comes from subscriptions and not advertising, it is of vital importance that trust is maintained in the brand, both online and in print. However, like most global brands, they face an ongoing threat from digital impersonation by cyber criminals leveraging their brand to create legitimate-looking web assets to dupe customers and potential customers. While The Economist has had a domain infringement provider in place, they were concerned that the relatively small number of detections did not represent the real scope of the threat.

RiskIQ External Threat Detection – Domain Infringement: RiskIQ’s Domain Infringement solution detects the unauthorized use of Economist brands within third-party registered domains. RiskIQ’s unique virtual-user crawling infrastructure intelligently analyzes the associated websites to provide the additional context needed to determine how threat actors may be using each domain and the risk it poses, such as brand impersonation, traffic diversion, phishing, and malware distribution. With this data, their security team can continuously monitor infringing site content and behavior to prioritize infringements according to their brand impact. Sites deemed to be at risk are taken down by RiskIQ.

Within the first two months of operation, RiskIQ has uncovered hundreds of infringement suspects, many of which are in review or under active monitoring, and has undertaken some successful takedowns.