Digital Risk Protection in the Age of AI-Powered Crime

DRP has never been more important.

Most digital threats — including phishing, social engineering, and deepfake scams — were once easy to spot. Spelling errors and awkward turns-of-phrase abounded in scam emails originating from unrecognizable domains. And while a voicemail purporting to come from a corporate VP may have sounded a bit like the actual VP, many employees understood that few senior execs had a vital and urgent need for an employee to run out and buy gift cards.

But that was before AI.

Now, scammers use artificial intelligence to craft natural-sounding communications. To create imposter personas online. To develop deep fake recordings that flawlessly mimic executive voices. These ploys target both corporations and government organizations.

No wonder, then, that 95% of recently-surveyed chief information security officers say that increasingly sophisticated digital scams present the greatest threat to organizational security.[1] And why the global digital risk protection market is expected to jump more than 145% from 2023 to 2028 — from $64.4 billion to $157.8 billion.[2]

As digital threats become more sophisticated, organizations need innovative solutions that keep pace with these evolving risks. Babel Street offers a powerful answer. The Babel Street Risk Intelligence Platform streamlines the process of sifting through overwhelming volumes of data, allowing businesses and government agencies to focus on actionable intelligence and proactive protection for employees, brands, and operations.

Babel Street empowers analysts to deploy AI agents that execute complex intelligence workflows at machine speed. The platform can analyze vast datasets to extract relevant entities, identify risks, map relationships, and assemble comprehensive intelligence. Its advanced pattern recognition capabilities uncover threat behaviors that are often missed by manual analysis, giving organizations a critical advantage against digital risk.

Beyond detection, Babel Street transforms chaotic publicly available information (PAI) into verified, contextual intelligence. Drawing from more than 143,000 global sources in over 200 languages, the platform delivers insights in your preferred language and enhances data for elite tradecraft at scale. Every piece of ingested data is enriched and auditable, ensuring organizations receive reliable information for robust digital risk protection.

Babel Street customers benefit from:

• Improved ability to spot digital risks — AI‑driven pattern recognition surfaces suspicious behavior in high‑volume operational environments.
• Heightened decision making for risk prevention and mitigation — By better understanding bad actors, their tactics, and the connections among them, organizations can better protect themselves against digital threats and mitigate the effects of any attacks.
• Improved brand reputation — The ability to detect digital threats like lookalike sites and deepfakes allows organizations to get ahead of potential fallout.

Digital risk protection is more important than ever. Working with Babel Street can help your organization more quickly and effectively spot, and stop, the bad actors who seek to damage your company, brand, and employees.

Read on to learn more about digital risk: What it is, the harm it can cause businesses and government agencies, and how a risk intelligence platform can help.

What is digital risk?

Digital risk is the risk of an organization suffering financial, operational, legal, or reputational damage due to threats arising from the digital environment.

What types of threats does digital risk protection detect?

By searching and monitoring the surface web, dark web, social media sites, and a host of other publicly available information (PAI) sources, DRP solutions can detect:

• Identity and impersonation threats — These include impersonation accounts, deepfake videos, and credential leaks.
• Brand hijacking — This occurs when wrongdoers post lookalike websites designed to imitate a legitimate company’s internet presence. These sites are used to trick customers into buying nonexistent products.
• Identity and impersonation threats — Wrongdoers create impersonation accounts, produce deepfake videos, or leak credentials, aiming to deceive individuals and organizations by pretending to be trusted sources.
• Phishing and spear phishing threats — In business and government, “business email compromise attacks” are a type of broad-based phishing effort through which scammers impersonate legitimate entities to trick victims into revealing sensitive business information.
• Threats against corporate or organizational infrastructure — These can include phishing attacks prompting employees to download malware.
• Insider risk — Employees themselves can present digital risk. These risks range from unhappy employees offering organizational information for sale on the dark web to loyal workers unthinkingly oversharing corporate information on social media or professional platforms.
• Physical risk, such as threats against corporate executives — These risks are often discussed in the virtual world before being implemented in real life.
• Synthetic identity rings — These rings use AI to blend factual personally identifiable information (PII) with fake data. These synthetic identities are then used to trick “do not pay” lists to enable the payout of false insurance claims, and to commit other types of financial malfeasance.

How is digital risk protection different from cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is a set of measures taken to protect computers, networks, and computing systems against attack or unauthorized access. DRP protects people and brands from external attacks. Because digital risk crimes are committed to gain access to corporate data and systems, some practitioners consider DRP to be a component of cybersecurity.

Who is vulnerable to digital risks?

Everyone. Digital risks threaten executives, employees, customers, brands, supply chain partners, and facilities.

Who needs digital risk protection the most?

While virtually every business and government agency can benefit from DRP, certain types of organizations are at heightened risk. In the business arena, these include financial services and insurance companies, healthcare organizations, ecommerce and retail businesses, and technology companies. Because of the role they play in protecting national infrastructure, along with public health and safety, virtually all public and government agencies need DRP — most notably, law enforcement and military organizations. The members of these organizations’ supply chains are also vulnerable to digital risk.

How does digital risk protection work?

DRP works best when organizations deploy AI-powered risk intelligence platforms to detect early, online indicators of risk. These indicators may include unflattering mentions of a company or brand; lookalike domains; corporate data appearing on dark web marketplaces; overshares on social media and professional platforms; and more. Risk intelligence platforms can find indicators of these risks, analyze findings, prioritize risks in order of credibility and potential impact, then use this insight to coordinate responses with security teams.

How does digital risk protection improve external threat visibility?

By scouring the surface web, dark web, social media sites, and other sources of PAI for threat indicators, a DRP solution increases threat visibility without straining existing resources.

How does digital risk protection prevent identity-based attacks?

Identity-based attacks target user credentials to gain access to corporate systems or data. Think of an attacker who tricks an employee into sharing their login information, then uses that login to download corporate data. By monitoring the dark web marketplaces where corporate credentials are offered for sale, organizations can often prevent bad actors from implementing these attacks.

Can digital risk protection detect executive impersonation?

Yes. Executive impersonation is a type of social engineering attack through which a wrongdoer poses as a corporate executive. His goal is to manipulate employees into performing harmful actions. DRP can spot the threat of executive impersonation by monitoring social media and professional platforms for fake profiles, and by detecting leaked executive credentials.

How does digital risk protection help stop phishing and domain spoofing?

DRP solutions help stop phishing and domain spoofing by continuously searching new domain registrations and flagging lookalike domains. Phishing emails targeting employees could come from the lookalike domain and easily be mistaken for those originating from the legitimate domain. DRP solutions can spot these types of domains, and alert security teams. In doing so, they can prevent phishing emails from reaching employees.

What role does digital risk protection play in managing digital footprint risks?

A digital footprint risk is a security vulnerability created by online information about a person or organization. The more data that is publicly visible, the easier it is for criminals to exploit. For example, on a professional networking site, an employee may unwittingly provides attackers with information that can be used for identity impersonation, phishing attacks, social engineering attacks, or physical security threats. Additional threats come from exposed personal information (emails, job titles, birthdays) and leaked credentials (usernames and passwords from past breaches).

DRP solutions can spot this compromising information online. Once this information has been found, security teams can take appropriate steps to mitigate it.

How does digital risk protection reduce brand impersonation risk?

By proactively monitoring and mitigating attempts to misuse a company’s brand online. DRP solutions scan the internet for lookalike domain names and imposter ecommerce sites. The right DRP solutions can spot these scams before customers or corporate reputations are affected. DRP solutions can also track social media platforms and online marketplaces, identifying listings for fake products. They can identify mobile apps pretending to be a company’s official apps.

How can organizations implement digital risk protection effectively?

To meet the challenge of detecting today’s threats, organizations need to deploy AI-powered risk intelligence platforms capable of finding, analyzing, and coalescing vast amounts of risk-related data.

What are the key features to look for in a digital risk protection platform?

For optimized DRP, organizations need automated, AI-powered solutions that can access a vast array of PAI appearing on all layers of the internet, including the deep- and dark web. The best DRP solutions transform chaotic global data into verified, evidence-grade intelligence that can be acted upon with confidence. To accomplish this, a DRP solution must be able to refine, correlate, and contextualize data, then operationalize it for use in real-world investigative and decision workflows.

What metrics measure the success of digital risk protection?

The success of DRP solutions can be measured against metrics for threat detection, response effectiveness, and risk reduction, among others. Threat detection metrics measure the number of threats detected, time to detection, and other metrics. Threat response metrics measure time to remediation and percentage of threats remediated. Risk reduction metrics measure decreases in the number of successful phishing attempts targeting employees; reductions in instances of credential compromise; and decreases in lookalike websites and impersonation accounts. Comparing these metrics before and after the deployment of DRP solutions can help chart the solution’s value to an organization.

How does digital risk protection improve overall risk management strategy?

Risk management is a multi-faceted discipline that, in broad terms, consists of continuously and proactively identifying and assessing the vulnerabilities, threats, and potential disruptions facing an organization, then implementing strategies to ensure secure, ongoing operations. Digital risk protection is vital to the risk identification and assessment components of a complete risk management strategy.

End notes

1. Splunk, “The CISO Report 2026: From Risk to Resilience in the AI Era,” accessed April 2026, https://www.splunk.com/en_us/form/ciso-report.html

2. MarketsandMarkets, “Digital Risk Protection Market: Size, Share, Trends, Growth Analysis and Forecast,” accessed April 2026, https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/digital-risk-protection-market-97138045.html

Disclaimer:

All names, companies, and incidents portrayed in this document are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, companies, and products are intended or should be inferred.