What to Know About Digital Risk Management for Advertising Agencies

There are numerous industries that have aided the world immensely throughout the past few decades and continue to do so in 2019. Advertising is one of these fields, and as the industry has progressed in the past few years, it has become evident how important it is to our society. Advertising has gone digital in the 21^st century, and it seems that this trend will only continue as the future progresses. As advertising becomes even more interconnected with the Internet and other web-based technologies, it has become evident that there is a major need for advanced cyber security and protection from digital risk in this industry. In order to run an efficacious advertising agency, it is crucial to ensure that your business’ sensitive data is safe from cyber criminals, and that your company’s digital risk is effectively managed. 

What Does Digital Risk Entail?

Before learning about how to defend your advertising agency from digital risk, you have to understand what exactly digital risk is. Learning about the threats of digital risk is the only way to effectively protect yourself from it. Digital risk entails three main categories: data loss detection, attack surface reduction, and defending your brand’s online security. Data loss detection includes monitoring data that has been exposed, attack surface reduction is comprised of defending your company’s IT infrastructure from cyber criminals, and defending online brand security entails finding and getting rid of impersonations of your company’s brand on social media as well as other online platforms. Understanding these three categories is essential when creating a strategy to defend your advertising agency from digital risk.

How Can Advertising Agencies Defend Against Digital Risk?

Once you understand digital risk and all that it entails, learning how to defend your business from it becomes much simpler. There are numerous approaches for managing your digital risk, and in order to keep your advertising agency safe from malicious hackers, it is important to learn exactly what to do. The first facet for shielding your company from digital risk is to identify your crucial business assets and learn about the different types of sensitive data that a hacker would want to steal from you. Think about what threat actors would want to steal from your business, from client data to financial information, and this will reveal to you what you need to protect. Once you know what data you think you should be guarding, you will have to monitor for unwanted exposure throughout a multitude of platforms, including the deep, dark and open webs, git repositories, criminal forums, and other locations online.

Once you understand what your digital risk is, you need to learn how to defend your company from cyber criminals. You should set up a tactical mitigation strategy, which includes removing offending content from sites that you can find through searching social media, ISP abuse notifications, and legal notices that offer removal tools. Along with a tactical mitigation strategy, you will also want to implement an operational mitigation approach, which entails implementing a monitoring strategy, embedding security operations for exposure points, and measuring your digital risk. Utilizing these types of strategies will provide you with total visibility of your business’ safety, and will enable you to keep your advertising agency secure.

Final Thoughts

Advertising is an industry that has the potential to be exposed to digital risk, so it is important to learn how to protect your agency from it. Learning about and understanding how to defend against digital risk is imperative in order to succeed in the 21^st century.