Demand for digital risk protection (DRP) solutions has skyrocketed with the rise in cyberattacks targeting an organization’s brand equity, customers, and employees. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work environments, causing many organizations to rush digital transformation initiatives, such as cloud migration, leading to increased risk and exposure of digital assets. In addition, the lines between work and personal devices have become increasingly blurred, which changed the traditional security perimeter, making it more difficult for legacy security solutions to protect an enterprise’s digital assets. With sophisticated AI/ML algorithms, hackers have been launching new targeted phishing campaigns on a large scale, imitating an organization’s external digital assets, such as websites, mobile apps, and social media accounts. As more business and personal interactions go virtual, the risk of customers and employees falling for a phishing attack impersonating a company brand or executive has increased significantly.

The dynamic nature of the threat landscape and the vast number of resources it takes to monitor, analyze, and mitigate phishing attempts effectively makes it impossible for organizations to protect their external attack surface without the help of a designated DRP platform. A successful phishing attack can have devastating consequences, including brand erosion, business disruption, and considerable financial losses. As a result, more organizations prioritize protecting their external attack surface beyond the corporate firewall.

The rise of new cyber threats and the greater risk of being attacked on the external digital surface have increased the demand for DRP products, leading to more vendors from adjacent cybersecurity fields offering DRP use cases. Specifically, cybersecurity vendors are consolidating CTI, EASM, and DRP capabilities to provide organizations with a holistic security posture for their digital footprint. As enterprise customers prefer to buy from fewer vendors, Frost & Sullivan expects more pure-play DRP providers to offer additional services packaged into one managed subscription model during the next 5 years.

Author: Martin Naydenov