What is digital risk protection?
Digital risk protection is the practice of finding and removing the threats to a brand that sit outside its own network — on social platforms, in app stores, on look-alike domains and across the open web.
Also called DRP.
The defining feature is where the risk lives. Traditional security protects infrastructure the business controls: its network, its endpoints, its identity provider. Digital risk protection covers everything a business is exposed to but cannot configure — an impersonating profile on Instagram, a cloned app, a domain registered one character away from its own.
Because the assets belong to someone else, the work is different too. There is nothing to patch. The response is evidence, a report through the platform's own process, and a record of what happened — which is why a digital risk protection programme is judged on the completeness of its monitoring and the success rate of its takedowns rather than on any control it has installed.
Social media is the largest surface in most programmes, and the least well mapped. Brands typically know their domains and rarely know the full set of accounts carrying their name.
Related terms
- Brand impersonationBrand impersonation is the use of a brand's name, logo or imagery on an account, page or profile that the brand does not own, in a way that presents it as official or affiliated.
- TakedownA takedown is the removal of an infringing or impersonating account, post or page by the platform that hosts it, following a report the platform accepts.
- Social media governanceSocial media governance is the set of controls that establishes who owns a brand's social accounts, who can reach them and how that access is granted and removed — as distinct from managing what gets published on them.