How to Protect Your Digital Assets from Cyber Threats in 2025

For decades, companies have invested heavily in securing their internal systems with solutions like firewalls, endpoint protection, and intrusion detection, all focused on preventing attackers from breaching the corporate perimeter. In spite of this, a dangerous blind spot has developed: the vast ecosystem of digital assets that exist beyond the corporate perimeter, on platforms companies don't directly control.

Your brand presence on social media, domain names resembling yours, third-party marketplaces selling your products, and impersonated executive social profiles—all exist in this external space where traditional security tools have no visibility or control. In fact, 83 percent of cyberattacks arise outside the limits of conventional security. This means that, every time your business expands its digital footprint, you also expand your attack surface and open your organization up to new vulnerabilities that bad actors are eagerly waiting to exploit. Yet, despite this, only 17 percent of organizations can clearly identify and inventory their exposed digital assets.

With the global cost of cybercrime projected to reach a staggering $23.84 trillion annually by 2027, this lack of visibility is increasingly unsustainable as cybercriminals shift their focus to these external resources. When attackers can impersonate your brand on social media, create convincing phishing domains, or leak sensitive information on dark web forums, the damage to your reputation and bottom line can be just as severe as a network breach, yet many businesses remain completely unaware until after the damage is done.

Effective digital asset protection requires a holistic approach that combines visibility into threats, proactive protection measures, and the ability to disrupt attacks before they cause damage.

Read on to discover how a unified external cybersecurity platform can help organizations identify and remediate threats targeting their brands, domains, people, and assets across the public attack surface.

What is Digital Asset Protection?

Digital asset protection is a comprehensive strategy for safeguarding your organization's entire digital presence, including its brands, domains, people, and data, against malicious attacks that develop outside traditional security boundaries on the surface web, the deep web, or the dark web. Imagine building a fortress with robust walls but leaving the surrounding villages unprotected. This is the reality for many businesses today — well-defended internal systems, but vulnerable digital assets spread across the open internet.

Where conventional cybersecurity measures focus on securing systems inside your network, digital asset protection addresses the growing number of threats that originate externally, where familiar security tools have limited reach.

More specifically, digital asset protection safeguards:

• Brand assets: Logos, trademarks, marketing materials, and visual identity elements
• Domain assets: Websites, URLs, landing pages, and other digital properties
• Social media presence: Official accounts, content, followers, and engagement metrics across major global and regional platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
• Customer and employee data: Personal information, credentials, and sensitive records
• Intellectual property: Proprietary processes, designs, creative works, and trade secrets
• Executive information: PII and social media profiles of leadership and their family members, whose compromise could lead to impersonation or targeted threats

As digital adversaries grow more savvy, robust protection of these precious resources must be a top priority for any organization wanting to maintain business continuity, preserve customer trust, and uphold its reputation. But to figure out how to protect your business, first you must understand the dangers. So, what kind of threats are businesses up against?

The Growing Digital Asset Threat Landscape

In 2024 and early 2025, cyber threats targeting digital assets have reached alarming levels. Notably, the BlackCat ransomware group targeted Change Healthcare in February 2024, crippling medical claims processing nationwide and costing UnitedHealth Group nearly $2.5 billion. 

The same year, a breach at National Public Data exposed sensitive information of nearly all Americans, affecting 2.9 billion records and eventually forcing the company out of business. At least nine telecom companies, including giants like AT&T and Verizon, suffered devastating attacks by suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers, compromising call metadata and geolocation data. Additionally, Snowflake experienced one of the largest data breaches ever, with hackers accessing sensitive data from hundreds of clients.

In late 2024/early 2025, ransomware attacks continued to dominate headlines. ENGlobal Corporation endured a ransomware attack that caused six-weeks of disruption. Meanwhile, Gravy Analytics suffered a breach exposing precise location data for millions, and hackers stole $85 million in cryptocurrency from Phemex exchange. This is just a small selection of the thousands of incidents that occur every day. With cybercriminals becoming more sophisticated, the stakes have never been higher.

Let’s take a closer look at the type of threats you’ll need to consider.

Common Types of Digital Threats

Brand impersonation and spoofing

Cybercriminals often create fraudulent social media accounts, websites, and digital content that mimic legitimate brands to deceive employees and customers, and damage reputations. These types of impersonations can lead to data breaches, financial fraud, customer confusion, and a significant erosion of trust.

Domain impersonation

Attackers use domain impersonation tactics like typosquatting to create look-alike domains that deceive users into engaging with phishing sites or fraudulent content. These threats can lead to credential theft, malware distribution, and brand damage. Recent alerts for malicious or fraudulent domains have increased by 40 percent.

Social media account takeovers

Criminals may compromise official social accounts to spread misinformation, conduct scams, or damage brand reputation. Once commandeered, these accounts provide a trusted platform to target followers with malicious content. According to the FBI, social media impersonations have cost businesses worldwide over $5.3 billion.

Data breaches and leaks

Sensitive information frequently gets exposed through unauthorized access or accidental disclosure, resulting in compliance violations, financial losses, and reputational harm. Customer data, intellectual property, and proprietary information are prime targets. In 2024, the global average cost of a data breach was $4.88m, but breaches and leaks have frequently led to billions of dollars in lost revenue, remediation costs, and regulatory penalties for a long list of companies. 

Executive threats

There has been a significant rise in online threats against corporate executives, with over 2,200 threats identified in five weeks following the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Executives are facing increasing risks from AI-driven disinformation, deepfake attacks, and online harassment and require enhanced security measures. Worryingly, more than 75 percent of executives‘ credentials are already exposed. On top of putting C-Suite staff in physical danger, this also makes it easier for bad actors to create fake profiles or compromise existing accounts of organizational leaders to conduct Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, solicit fraudulent transfers, or manipulate employees and partners. An estimated $2bn in losses has been driven by executive impersonation. 

Phishing campaigns

These attacks frequently target organizational credentials, customer information, and financial data through deceptive emails, messages, and websites designed to appear legitimate and trustworthy. Phishing attacks caused 40 percent of data breaches in 2024.

Ransomware attacks

These involve malicious software that encrypts company data and systems, with the perpetrators demanding payment for restoration. Ransomware operations increasingly involve data exfiltration before encryption, creating double-extortion scenarios.

Deep and dark web threats

Criminal sites and forums hidden from public view continue to host discussions about targeting specific organizations, sell compromised data, and provide attack tools. Early detection of these conversations allows organizations to implement countermeasures before attacks materialize.

Core Components of Digital Asset Protection

Relying on a reactionary approach to digital asset protection is a recipe for disaster. The fallout from any cyber incident is unpredictable, but any damage is likely to rapidly spread uncontrollably across the internet. A proactive, multi-layered approach that combines visibility, protection, and disruption not only identifies potential threats, but also neutralizes them before they can inflict harm. By understanding and implementing the core components of digital asset protection, you can effectively safeguard your digital presence, customer relationships, and sensitive data.

This involves a three-pronged approach that addresses the complete lifecycle of external threats — from initial detection to final resolution:

Visibility

• Comprehensive monitoring should provide visibility across your entire digital footprint. Without this oversight, security teams remain blind to emerging threats until it's too late. To be effective, monitoring must cover:
  • Social media platforms (including comments and mentions)
  • Surface web (public websites, forums, news sites)
  • Deep and dark web (hacker forums, marketplaces, Telegram groups)
  • Mobile app stores
  • Domain registrations
  • Code repositories
  • Third party vendors

• External attack surface management (EASM) must involve a systematic approach to identifying, inventorying, and monitoring all your internet-exposed assets that could offer entry points to attackers.
• Leverage AI-powered detection capabilities to scale beyond what human analysts can achieve alone. Employing advanced technologies like computer vision for image analysis, natural language processing for text evaluation, and machine learning to identify patterns and anomalies allow you to monitor millions of data points simultaneously.

Protection

• Protection is the next step beyond basic monitoring, and means implementing advanced proactive measures to prevent the exploitation of your digital assets. This includes:
  • Brand protection policies that define acceptable usage of logos and trademarks
  • Domain monitoring with automated alerts for suspicious registrations
  • Executive and VIP monitoring to detect impersonation attempts
  • Credential theft monitoring to identify leaked passwords
  • Data leakage detection to identify exposed sensitive information
• Formulate response strategies that should include incident playbooks, designated response teams, and clear escalation paths to ensure quick action when threats are detected. These protocols should easily integrate with your existing security workflows and tools.
• Real-time monitoring is an essential capability that provides you with timely awareness of incoming threats, allowing your security teams to act before any significant damage can occur. This continuous tracking is especially relevant for time-sensitive threats like viral social media posts or breaking news events.

Disruption

• Once your monitoring solutions have alerted you to a developing problem, you can employ takedown services to ensure the rapid removal of malicious content. Highly efficient takedown services can deal with:
  • Deactivation of fraudulent social media accounts
  • Takedown of phishing websites and malicious domains
  • Removal of unauthorized mobile applications
  • Scrubbing PII from data leak sites
  • Elimination of profiles impersonating executives 
• Industry partnerships leverage established connections with social networks, domain registrars, hosting providers, and other critical internet infrastructure companies to expedite takedown requests. These alliances act as a disruption network that enables faster remediation times compared to what organizations could achieve independently.

Best Practices for Digital Asset Protection

Developing an effective digital asset protection program requires a strategic configuration of tools, techniques, and human expertise working in sync. Organizations that successfully protect their digital assets follow established methodologies to enhance threat visibility while minimizing response times. By incorporating these battle-tested strategies, you can significantly reduce your organization's exposure to external threats while optimizing resource allocation and strengthening overall security resilience.

Implement comprehensive monitoring

Draw up a complete inventory of your digital assets, then establish continuous monitoring across all channels where threats could arise. This includes social media, domains, mobile apps, and the deep and dark web. 

Establish incident response procedures

Develop clear protocols for addressing different types of digital threats. Document step-by-step procedures, assign responsibility to specific team members, and create communication templates for various scenarios. Schedule regular tabletop exercises to help guarantee that teams can execute these procedures smoothly during live incidents.

Deploy automated threat detection

Apply automated systems to identify potential threats at scale. Automation enables continuous monitoring across the global digital ecosystem and provides immediate alerts when suspicious activities are detected. Having these capabilities allows you to reduce response times and minimize the potential for damage.

Harness AI-powered analysis

AI technologies can easily process massive amounts of data to identify the suspicious patterns and anomalies that might represent threats. Machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision help security teams focus on genuine dangers while reducing false positives, increasing efficiency and improving detection accuracy.

Maintain regular security audits

Conduct periodic assessments of your digital security measures to identify potential gaps and close them before they can be exploited. Your audits should evaluate policies, procedures, and technologies to ensure they remain effective against novel challenges. 

Train employees on security protocols

Well-informed employees can act as valuable sensors for detecting potential dangers across your organization. So, it’s best practice to educate all staff on recognizing and reporting digital threats. Training should cover everything from brand impersonation and phishing attempts to social engineering tactics. 

Partner with digital risk protection experts

Specialized expertise can significantly strengthen your protection capabilities. By partnering with digital risk protection providers like ZeroFox, you can benefit from experienced analysts, faster takedowns, and peace of mind knowing your organization's digital assets are under continuous monitoring to keep your brand and assets secure.

ZeroFox's Digital Risk Protection Platform

ZeroFox delivers enterprise-grade digital asset protection through its unified external cybersecurity platform. Designed to address the growing complexity of the threat landscape, the platform helps organizations secure their entire digital presence.

Here’s what ZeroFox delivers:

Comprehensive protection capabilities

The ZeroFox platform protects against the full spectrum of external threats, including:

• Brand protection against impersonation and abuse
• Domain monitoring and phishing site takedowns
• Social media account protection and content moderation
• Deep and dark web monitoring for stolen credentials and attack planning
• Executive protection against impersonation and physical threats
• Counterfeit product and intellectual property protection

AI powered analysis

ZeroFox's platform leverages advanced artificial intelligence to process millions of data points daily and identify genuine threats. The system uses:

• Computer vision to detect brand logos in images and videos
• Natural language processing to analyze text for malicious content
• Machine learning algorithms to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent content
• Behavioral analysis to identify suspicious patterns across platforms

Global coverage and monitoring

With monitoring across over 1 billion content sources worldwide, ZeroFox provides truly global visibility. The platform covers:

• Major social media networks in multiple languages
• Surface web including forums, news sites, and blogs
• Deep and dark web criminal forums and marketplaces
• Mobile app stores and marketplaces
• Domain registration sites and DNS records

Automated remediation capabilities

Once threats are identified, ZeroFox's platform enables rapid response through:

• Automated takedown workflows for fraudulent content
• Direct integration with major platforms for expedited removal
• Access to the Global Disruption Network of hosting providers, registrars, and platforms
• Continuous monitoring to ensure complete remediation

Proven results

Four of the Fortune 10 and hundreds of the Global 2000 across all industries choose ZeroFox to handle their digital asset protection. The platform has demonstrated significant impact, including:

• 300 percent increase in successful takedowns year-over-year
• Protection for over 40 million people and assets
• More than 12 billion threat intelligence records collected
• 267 percent return on investment according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study

Protect Your Digital Assets in 2025 and Beyond

As bad actors and cybercriminals adopt advanced techniques like AI-powered attacks and deepfakes to compromise brand integrity, expose sensitive data, and erode customer trust, the vulnerability of digital assets can no longer be ignored.

By combining AI-powered analysis with human expertise, ZeroFox's unified external cybersecurity platform provides the visibility, protection, and disruption capabilities needed to defend your entire digital footprint. 

Ready to strengthen your digital asset protection? Request a demo today to see how ZeroFox enables organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and protect what matters most.