May 17, 2022

GRF Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Scorecard Blog Series

GRF Cybersecurity Risk Assessment & Scorecard - Reputation

Cybersecurity Blog Series Home Page    Next post: IP Reputation

Have you ever wondered how end users view your company? Is your domain seen as safe and trusted? Is your website optimized? These are just some of the areas that business analytics tools assess to evaluate your brand. Every organization is adapting to the changing digital landscape by creating social media accounts and trying new marketing techniques to grow. With the increase in cybercriminals trying to take advantage of these organizational opportunities, it is important to monitor how you are perceived over the internet.

At GRF, we offer a service that combines several assessments to deliver a rating on your brand’s online health. Some of the main items that rate your overall online brand include the Web of Trust, Domain Safety, Website Quality and Optimization, and Social Profiles. Each of these tests gives insight into why people may or may not be visiting your website or supporting your business. For example, you can see if your pages are search engine friendly or whether your site is showing as safe. Scanning your organization can identify areas of strength and and areas that may need improvement.

What does GRF monitor?

  1. Web of Trust (WOT) – This security service uses a website’s reputation and online reviews to help people make decisions about whether the site can be trusted. WOT looks at vendor reliability, child safety, trustworthiness, and privacy. While your organization may not currently be within the registered database, it is important to keep track how you are viewed.
  2. Domain Safety pulls from blacklist search engines to develop your online reputation and detect fraudulent or malicious websites. You can pull each of the search engines used into a checklist to verify whether your organization is seen as safe across the board.
  3. Website Optimization and Quality looks into the website landing page to monitor items to help optimize your brand. It looks at items such as SEO-friendly web URLs, Google Analytics Tracking, most commonly used words, and more. It can help decide where to put your resources and the content you should add to your website to enhance your brand.
  4. Social Profiles show each of your organization’s social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). This also helps to identify a fraudulent page that you did not sanction. Not knowing what information is being posted on social media with your branding creates reputational risk.

How can you improve your Digital Footprint?

  1. Utilize the reputation services like the Web of Trust to be correctly categorized and monitor where your reputation ranks.
  2. Monitor blacklist websites such as AbuseIPDB to ensure that your organization is not being flagged as spam or malicious.
  3. Validate your search engine optimization strategy by working through website optimization and quality improvements.
  4. Track social media accounts to ensure that there are no identical and malicious/copycat accounts.

How GRF Can Help

At GRF, we understand that you are constantly trying to improve your online reputation to build your brand, audience, donor base, and spread your mission. As part of our cybersecurity audits, our Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Scorecard provides an ongoing scan of your online brand along with 19 other categories to provide best practices and recommendations for improvement.

For more information on GRF’s Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Scorecard, or about our cybersecurity capabilities, reach out to our IT & Risk Supervisor Darren Hulem, CISA, CEH, Security +, or Risk Analyst Tom Brown, CAPM, through our contact us page.

Next post: IP Reputation

GRF Cybersecurity Risk Assessment & Scorecard - Reputation
The digital transformation happening in the workplace requires a heightened awareness of your organization’s cybersecurity posture. Managing the risks has become another full-time job. The GRF Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Scorecard helps identify possible weaknesses and vulnerabilities by evaluating risk in 20 different categories. The scorecard will evaluate your cyber posture, propose remediation steps, and help eliminate vulnerabilities that your organization is facing.