What is digital risk protection?
Digital risk protection (DRP) is a cybersecurity discipline that monitors and mitigates threats to your digital assets across public, deep, and dark web channels. This means it looks for dangers outside your network that could harm your business, like fake websites using your brand or stolen passwords being sold online.
DRP works by continuously scanning the internet for risks like brand impersonation, phishing campaigns, data leaks, and malicious activity. It then helps you protect against these threats before they become successful attacks.
The approach encompasses several key functions:
Brand protection: Detecting unauthorized use of your company name, logos, and trademarks
Fraud prevention: Identifying fake websites and phishing campaigns targeting your customers
Credential leak detection: Finding exposed credentials and sensitive information on underground forums
Threat intelligence: Gathering insights about threat actor tactics and planned attacks
Cloud Attack Retrospective: 8 Common Threats to Watch for in 2025
Drawing from detection data across thousands of organizations, we highlight eight commonly observed MITRE ATT&CK techniques and offer practical guidance on how Wiz can help to detect and mitigate them.
Why digital risk protection is critical for cloud environments
Cloud adoption has fundamentally changed how attackers target businesses. Your infrastructure, applications, and data are now distributed across multiple cloud providers. This shift means the traditional network perimeter is dissolved and replaced by a control plane perimeter defined by Identity and Access Management (IAM). Pairing external threat findings with code-to-cloud context—understanding what each exposed credential can access, which data each misconfigured resource exposes, and how external entry points connect to sensitive assets—turns generic alerts into prioritized, owner-routed remediation tasks.
Attackers have shifted from trying to "break in" to simply "logging in" using stolen credentials. Industry research consistently shows credential-based attacks represent a majority of successful cloud breaches, making external credential monitoring a critical security control. They harvest exposed API keys, passwords, and other sensitive information from sources outside your direct control. Ephemeral cloud resources and API-based services create new exposure points that perimeter-focused security tools—such as traditional firewalls and network monitoring systems—often miss because they focus on internal network traffic rather than external digital footprints.
This makes DRP essential for cloud security. It helps you see your cloud environment from an attacker's perspective, identifying external risks before they can be used to compromise your internal systems.
DRP and compliance requirements
Digital risk protection supports multiple compliance frameworks and security standards:
ISO/IEC 27002:2022 – Control 5.7 (Threat intelligence) requires organizations to collect and analyze threat information. DRP provides external threat intelligence specific to your organization. Control 8.16 (Monitoring activities) mandates monitoring for anomalous behavior; DRP extends this to external channels.
SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria – CC7.2 and CC7.3 require monitoring systems and detecting security events. DRP demonstrates proactive monitoring of external threats and timely detection of brand impersonation and credential leaks.
PCI DSS 4.0 – Requirement 12.10 mandates incident response capabilities. DRP provides early warning of payment card data leaks and phishing campaigns targeting customers, supporting faster incident response.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework – The Detect function (DE.CM) calls for monitoring to detect cybersecurity events. DRP extends detection to external threat sources beyond traditional network monitoring.
GDPR Article 32 – Requires appropriate security measures including the ability to detect data breaches. DRP helps identify personal data leaks on external sites, supporting breach notification requirements.
Note: DRP supports but doesn't replace these controls. It provides evidence of proactive threat monitoring and external risk management for audit purposes.
Core components of digital risk protection
A comprehensive DRP strategy includes several components that work together to monitor and defend your external digital footprint.
Brand and domain monitoring detects malicious or unauthorized use of your company's brand, logos, and domain names. This includes typosquatted domains, fake websites, and domain spoofing designed to trick your customers or employees.
Dark web intelligence involves monitoring underground forums, illicit marketplaces, and paste sites for compromised credentials and leaked sensitive data. Security researchers regularly track millions of infostealer logs—malware-harvested credentials and session tokens—traded on underground markets, making continuous dark web monitoring essential for detecting compromised accounts before attackers use them.
Social media protection focuses on identifying fake profiles, phishing campaigns conducted through social platforms, and brand impersonation that could damage your reputation. This component helps prevent social engineering attacks that target your employees and customers.
Executive and VIP protection monitors for threats against high-profile individuals in your organization. This includes doxxing attacks, targeted phishing, and exposure of personal information that could be used for social engineering.
How DRP differs from related security categories
DRP overlaps with several adjacent security disciplines but offers distinct capabilities:
DRP vs. External Attack Surface Management (EASM): EASM discovers and inventories internet-facing assets (domains, IPs, cloud services) to map your attack surface. DRP goes further by monitoring for active threats against those assets—such as credential leaks, brand impersonation, and dark web discussions. Many modern DRP platforms include EASM capabilities as a foundation.
DRP vs. Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP): TIPs aggregate and analyze threat data from multiple sources to inform security decisions. DRP focuses specifically on external threats to your organization's digital presence, providing actionable intelligence about risks targeting your brand, domains, and leaked data. DRP feeds often integrate into TIPs as a specialized source.
DRP vs. Brand Protection Services: Traditional brand protection focuses on trademark infringement and counterfeit goods. DRP extends this to cybersecurity threats including phishing sites, fake mobile apps, and social media impersonation that directly enable attacks against your organization and customers.
DRP vs. CNAPP Integration: Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) secure your internal cloud infrastructure. When integrated with DRP, CNAPPs correlate external threats with internal exposures—for example, linking a leaked credential to specific cloud resources it can access, or connecting a typosquatted domain to the legitimate API it's targeting.
Digital risk protection use cases for cloud organizations
For organizations operating in the cloud, DRP addresses specific threats that exploit distributed and internet-facing infrastructure. External attack surfaces—including exposed APIs, misconfigured storage buckets, and lookalike domains—create entry points that attackers actively target to gain initial access to cloud environments.
Phishing detection helps identify fake login pages targeting cloud service credentials. Cybercriminals continuously spin up new phishing sites at massive scale, creating lookalike domains that mimic AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other cloud provider login pages. DRP services detect these fraudulent sites through domain monitoring and automated scanning, then initiate takedown procedures through registrar relationships. Prioritize takedowns when the spoofed domain maps to internet-facing workloads or paths to sensitive data—for example, a fake AWS console login page targeting an account with production database access warrants immediate action.
Supply chain monitoring tracks third-party risks and vendor compromises that could affect your cloud environment. By monitoring for breaches at software suppliers and service providers, you can protect against supply chain attacks.
Data exposure detection continuously scans for exposed cloud storage buckets and misconfigured databases. DRP platforms monitor public internet sources—including search engines, code repositories, and cloud storage indexes—to identify accidentally exposed S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, and database instances before attackers discover them.
Vulnerability prioritization correlates external threats with internal vulnerabilities. When you know that attackers are actively discussing a specific vulnerability on the dark web, you can prioritize patching for exposed cloud workloads.
How digital risk protection works
The DRP process follows a continuous cycle designed to discover, analyze, and mitigate external threats systematically.
The discovery phase maps your complete digital footprint. This includes identifying all domains, subdomains, cloud services, social media profiles, and other public-facing assets that attackers could target.
During the monitoring phase, DRP solutions use AI-powered tools and threat intelligence feeds to continuously scan the surface, deep, and dark web. DRP platforms scan for specific threat indicators including lookalike domains (typosquatting variations of your domain), leaked credentials on paste sites and dark web markets, malicious mobile apps impersonating your brand, rogue public cloud endpoints exposing data, and social media accounts conducting phishing campaigns.
The analysis phase examines findings and correlates them with business context to determine severity and potential impact. This helps distinguish real threats from noise, allowing your team to focus on what matters most. Advanced platforms correlate external signals with internal exposure, identity, and data context to validate exploitability and route findings to the right team—for example, linking a leaked AWS credential to the specific S3 buckets and EC2 instances it can access, then assigning remediation to the resource owner.
In the mitigation phase, you take action against identified threats. This can include:
Automated takedown initiation for malicious websites through established registrar and hosting provider relationships, following abuse reporting workflows and legal requirements (actual takedown timing depends on provider response)
Submitting fraudulent domains to blocklists
Triggering internal remediation workflows
Notifying affected customers or partners
Get a personalized demo
Learn what makes Wiz the platform to enable your cloud security operation
DRP response playbooks
Use these playbooks to respond to common DRP findings:
Playbook 1: Lookalike domain detected
Validate (Security Analyst, 30 min): Verify domain registration date, WHOIS data, DNS records, and hosting location. Check for active website content or email configuration.
Assess risk (Security Analyst, 15 min): Determine if domain is actively used for phishing, has SSL certificate, appears in search results, or has been reported by customers.
Document evidence (Security Analyst, 15 min): Capture screenshots, WHOIS records, DNS data, and page source. Store in evidence management system with timestamp.
Initiate takedown (Legal/Security, 1 hour): Submit abuse report to registrar using pre-approved template. Include trademark documentation and evidence of malicious use.
Monitor progress (Security Analyst, ongoing): Track takedown request status. Escalate to registrar abuse team if no response within 48 hours.
Verify removal (Security Analyst, 15 min): Confirm domain no longer resolves and hosting is disabled. Update tracking system and close ticket.
Playbook 2: Leaked credentials discovered
Validate leak (Security Analyst, 15 min): Confirm credentials are associated with your organization's domains or services. Check breach date and source.
Test credential status (Security Analyst, 15 min): Determine if credentials are still active (without actually logging in—use account lockout or password reset flows to test validity).
Identify affected accounts (Identity Team, 30 min): Search IAM systems, cloud provider accounts, and SaaS platforms for matching usernames/emails.
Force password reset (Identity Team, 1 hour): Immediately reset passwords for affected accounts. Revoke active sessions and API keys.
Assess exposure (Security Analyst, 1 hour): Review access logs to determine if credentials were used. Check for unauthorized access or data exfiltration.
Notify user (Security/HR, 30 min): Inform affected employee or customer. Provide guidance on password hygiene and MFA enrollment.
Implement controls (Security Architect, ongoing): If pattern emerges, implement additional controls like mandatory MFA or conditional access policies.
Playbook 3: Exposed public cloud resource
Validate exposure (Cloud Security, 15 min): Confirm resource is publicly accessible. Identify cloud provider, account, and resource type (S3 bucket, storage container, database).
Assess data sensitivity (Data Security, 30 min): Sample exposed data to determine classification level. Check for PII, credentials, intellectual property, or customer data.
Immediate containment (Cloud Security, 15 min): Restrict public access through cloud provider console or API. Implement least-privilege access controls.
Identify resource owner (Cloud Security, 30 min): Use cloud tagging, deployment records, or CMDB to find responsible team.
Investigate root cause (Cloud Security/DevOps, 1 hour): Determine how misconfiguration occurred. Check IaC templates, deployment pipelines, and change history.
Assess impact (Security/Legal, 2 hours): Review access logs to determine if unauthorized parties accessed data. Determine breach notification requirements.
Implement prevention (Cloud Security, ongoing): Update IaC templates, implement policy-as-code checks, and add automated scanning to CI/CD pipelines.
Key benefits of implementing digital risk protection
Implementing a DRP program provides significant advantages that go beyond traditional security measures.
Proactive threat prevention allows you to identify and neutralize risks before they escalate into attacks. This shifts your security approach from reactive to proactive, giving you a significant advantage over attackers.
Reduced alert fatigue comes from DRP's ability to provide context and prioritize threats based on exploitability signals—such as whether a leaked credential is still active, whether a lookalike domain has active DNS records and hosting, and whether exposed data contains sensitive information. This filtering reduces raw threat feeds from thousands of daily alerts to dozens of actionable incidents.
Faster incident response results from early warnings about emerging threats, leaked credentials, and planned attack campaigns. Your incident response team gets a critical head start, reducing the time to detect and contain breaches. Code-to-cloud traceability and ownership context speed handoffs between SecOps, platform, and application teams—for example, when a leaked credential is detected, the system automatically identifies affected resources, notifies the owning team via their existing workflow tools (Slack, Jira, PagerDuty), and provides remediation guidance specific to that resource type.
Improved collaboration happens because DRP provides a unified view of external risks valuable to multiple teams. Security operations, fraud prevention, brand protection, and legal teams can all benefit from shared intelligence.
Measuring DRP program success
Track these metrics to demonstrate DRP value and optimize your program:
Detection metrics:
Time to detect new lookalike domains (target: <24 hours from registration)
Percentage of internet-facing assets inventoried (target: >95%)
Credential leak detection rate (leaked credentials found vs. estimated exposure)
Dark web mention volume and sentiment trends
Response metrics:
Mean time to takedown (MTTD) for malicious domains (target: <48 hours)
Takedown success rate (percentage of requests resulting in removal)
Mean time to remediate (MTTR) exposed credentials (target: <4 hours)
False positive rate for automated alerts (target: <10%)
Impact metrics:
Prevented phishing attacks (based on takedowns before customer reports)
Reduction in fraud incidents attributed to brand impersonation
Credential exposure dwell time (time between leak and detection)
Customer trust metrics (support tickets, social media sentiment)
Operational metrics:
Alert volume trends (should decrease as program matures)
Analyst time per investigation (should decrease with better tooling)
Cross-team collaboration efficiency (handoff time between security, legal, marketing)
Coverage expansion (new threat types and sources added)
Benchmark these metrics quarterly and correlate with business outcomes like reduced fraud losses and improved security posture scores.
Evaluating DRP solutions: Key criteria
When selecting a DRP platform, assess these capabilities:
Coverage and data sources:
Domain monitoring scope (TLDs covered, subdomain discovery depth)
Dark web access methods (forums, markets, paste sites, Telegram channels)
Social media platform coverage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok)
Mobile app store monitoring (iOS App Store, Google Play, third-party stores)
Code repository scanning (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, public paste sites)
Detection capabilities:
Lookalike domain detection algorithms (typosquatting, homograph attacks, combosquatting)
Credential leak detection with breach source attribution
Brand impersonation confidence scoring
Multilingual monitoring for global operations
Custom keyword and pattern matching
Response and remediation:
Takedown SLAs and success rates
Registrar and hosting provider relationships
Automated vs. manual takedown workflows
Legal documentation and evidence collection
Customer notification capabilities
Integration and workflow:
SIEM/SOAR integration methods (API, webhooks, syslog)
Ticketing system connectors (Jira, ServiceNow)
Threat intelligence platform feeds (STIX/TAXII support)
Alert deduplication and correlation
Custom workflow automation
Operational considerations:
False positive rates and validation processes
Alert prioritization and risk scoring
Multi-tenant support for MSPs
Compliance reporting (SOC 2, ISO 27001)
Privacy controls for dark web monitoring
Implementation challenges and considerations
While DRP offers powerful benefits, implementing a program comes with challenges you need to prepare for.
Integration complexity arises when connecting DRP data with your existing security stack. You need effective security orchestration to make external intelligence actionable within your SIEM, SOAR, and vulnerability management tools. Favor platforms that normalize multi-cloud resources and enrich external alerts with graph-based relationships—showing how an exposed credential connects to specific workloads, data stores, and network paths. This context-enriched approach cuts triage time from hours to minutes by eliminating manual correlation work.
Resource requirements include skilled analysts who can interpret threat intelligence and understand threat actor motivations. Without this expertise, the value of DRP data remains limited.
False positive management becomes crucial as comprehensive monitoring generates high volumes of alerts. Implement validation steps including domain age verification (newly registered domains are higher risk), WHOIS analysis to identify registrant patterns, SSL certificate inspection, content similarity scoring against legitimate sites, and manual review before initiating takedowns. Pre-checks prevent erroneous takedown requests that damage registrar relationships.
Cross-team coordination is essential because taking down malicious sites or responding to brand impersonation requires collaboration between security, legal, marketing, and business teams. Define a RACI matrix specifying who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each threat type. Create pre-approved takedown request templates that legal has vetted. Establish escalation paths with defined SLAs—for example, executive impersonation gets 2-hour response, lookalike domains get 24-hour response.
Legal and ethical considerations in DRP
Digital risk protection involves legal processes and ethical considerations that security teams must navigate carefully.
Takedown legal requirements: Domain and content takedowns require valid legal justification. Trademark infringement claims need documented proof of ownership and likelihood of confusion. Phishing sites can be reported under anti-abuse policies. Work with legal counsel to develop takedown request templates that meet registrar requirements and include necessary evidence (screenshots, WHOIS data, similarity analysis).
Dark web monitoring boundaries: Accessing certain dark web forums and markets may violate terms of service or local laws. Use DRP vendors with established legal access methods rather than conducting direct monitoring. Ensure your vendor's data collection methods comply with Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and equivalent international laws.
Privacy considerations: DRP monitoring may surface personal information about employees or customers. Implement privacy-by-design principles: collect only necessary data, limit access to authorized personnel, define retention periods, and establish processes for handling sensitive personal information discovered during monitoring.
Evidence preservation: When DRP identifies threats, preserve evidence for potential legal action or law enforcement reporting. Maintain chain of custody for screenshots, WHOIS records, and malicious content. Document timestamps and collection methods to ensure evidence admissibility.
International jurisdiction: Malicious domains and hosting may span multiple countries. Understand that takedown processes vary by jurisdiction and some regions have limited cooperation. Factor geographic complexity into response time expectations.
Tracking cloud-fluent threat actors - Part one: Atomic cloud IOCs
Strategies for tracking and defending against malicious activity and threats in the cloud using atomic indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Mehr lesen
How Wiz enhances digital risk protection through cloud security visibility
Digital risk protection becomes significantly more powerful when combined with deep visibility into your internal cloud environment. Wiz provides the critical cloud context needed to understand, prioritize, and act on external intelligence.
Wiz automatically discovers all internet-facing cloud assets through External Attack Surface Management, providing a complete view of your digital footprint. The Wiz Security Graph correlates external exposures with internal cloud resources, configurations, identities, and data to visualize real attack paths.
When your DRP tool alerts you to a leaked credential, Wiz instantly shows you what that credential can access and whether it's part of a toxic combination of risks. Wiz scans code repositories, container images, and configurations for exposed secrets that attackers can harvest and trade on the dark web if discovered.
The platform's attack path analysis reveals how external exposures connect to sensitive data and critical assets. This turns intelligence into action by showing you exactly which external threats pose the greatest risk to your specific environment.
Wiz Defend detects active threats in real time, alerting you when external risks are exploited for lateral movement or data exfiltration. The Threat Center provides continuous monitoring of emerging vulnerabilities with immediate exposure assessment.
Ready to see how unified cloud visibility elevates DRP? Get a demo to explore how agentless, code-to-cloud context turns external threat signals into prioritized fixes—showing exactly which leaked credentials access sensitive data, which exposed resources contain critical assets, and which attack paths pose real business risk.
See Wiz in action
Learn what makes Wiz the platform to enable your cloud security operation
