Protecting Your Website's Reputation with Magnolia DXP and GenAI-powered WebOrion® Monitor
Dec 3, 2024
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Blog_ProtectYourReputation

Protecting Your Website's Reputation with Magnolia DXP and GenAI-powered WebOrion® Monitor

Have you ever considered what would happen if hackers replaced your carefully crafted website content with offensive messages or disturbing images? Unfortunately, this nightmare scenario could become a reality for businesses affected by web defacement attacks, where cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities to make unauthorized changes to their websites. This can severely damage your brand’s reputation, disrupt operations, and erode customer trust.

This is where Cloudsine’s GenAI-powered WebOrion® Monitor has your back and can protect you from web defacements. With 24/7 monitoring and a new gen AI triage feature, WebOrion® Monitor quickly detects changes and categorizes alerts by severity level. This ensures you are the first to know about any defacement attempts and enables you to concentrate resources on the most critical alerts, keeping your website secure and minimizing potential impacts.

Within Magnolia DX Cloud’s advanced security package, Cloudsine’s WebOrion® Monitor is responsible for taking web defacement head-on and mitigating any threats posed to your website by web defacement attacks.

What Is a Web Defacement Attack?

A web defacement attack occurs when a hacker gains unauthorized access to a website and alters its appearance or content. Unlike other types of cyberattacks focused on data theft or service disruption, defacement attacks are often motivated by ideological, political, or personal reasons. Hackers may replace the original website content with their messages, including graphic images, offensive language, or propaganda. The primary goal is to publicly embarrass the target, spread false information, or damage the website's reputation.

Examples of Recent Defacement Attacks

In recent years, there have been several prominent web defacement attacks in the news:

LEGO's website hacked to push cryptocurrency scam (2024): On 4 October 2024, cryptocurrency scammers replaced the main website banner to promote a fake LEGO token, with links to a fraudulent website where users could “buy” the fake token.

Cloudsine lego example
Photo Credit: Mescad from Reddit (r/lego)

Zee Media website hacked by Bangladeshi hacker group (2024): On 21 August 2024, Zee Media’s homepage was defaced by ‘SYSTEMADMINBD’, a group of Bangladeshi hackers, in retaliation for “making fun of the flooding in Bangladesh”.

Cloudsine Bangladesh example
Photo Credit: Hackread.com

Consequences of a Web Defacement Attack

While it might seem as though a web defacement attack is merely a superficial inconvenience, the consequences can actually be quite severe.

  • Damage to brand reputation: When loyal customers of your brand see inappropriate content on your website, their trust in your brand may erode. This is especially damaging for large organizations or those that rely heavily on public perception such as government entities or banks.

  • Revenue loss: A defaced website undermines customer confidence in your security, as users may perceive your site as easily hacked. Thus, they may choose not to use your services, fearing their personal or financial data might be at risk. This is especially critical for large organizations in sectors such as banking or pharma.

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Protecting Your Website with WebOrion® Monitor and Gen AI Triage

Looking at the serious consequences of defacement attacks — eroded customer trust, revenue loss, and reputational damage — businesses need more than just basic security measures such as web application firewalls to safeguard their websites. This is where WebOrion® Monitor comes in, providing proactive monitoring designed to detect defacements early and give your team time to rectify the issue.

What is WebOrion® Monitor?

WebOrion® Monitor provides an instantaneous, agentless and continuous way to monitor all your websites for many different hacks including defacements, tampering of HTTP headers, JavaScript, TLS certificates and DNS/Whois changes. Powered by six innovative engines, WebOrion® Monitor provides you with a high level of assurance and reliability:

  1. HTML Content Analytics​: The URL is analyzed in granular detail for its HTML elements.

  2. Advanced Integrity​: This engine automatically checks HTML elements on both web servers and external files​.

  3. Image Analytics: A patented innovation, this engine renders a URL into a single image, allowing users to easily select the parts of the website to monitor. If there is any change detected, an email alert with screenshots will be sent.

  4. JavaScript Malware: This engine examines all JavaScript, allowing users to detect if there have been malicious scripts injected into their website, such as card skimming malicious content or crypto jacking.

  5. AI NLP Keyword: Beyond change or keyword detection, AI enhances detection capabilities by adding a new level of intelligence to analyze.

  6. SSL/DNS/Whois Monitoring: ​This engine monitors for DNS hijacking, DNS poisoning, or DNS redirection attack​s.

WebOrion® Monitor’s Gen AI Triage Feature

Security teams often suffer from alert fatigue, where they are bombarded with numerous alerts – many of which are false positives – making it difficult to focus on the most critical issues.

To combat this, we have launched a new AI triage feature for WebOrion® Monitor, which mimics the role of a human SOC (Security Operations Centre) agent. This AI intelligently analyzes and classifies alerts into ‘High risk,’ ‘Medium risk,’ or ‘Low risk’ categories, ensuring that your team can prioritize their attention on the most urgent threats.

How does WebOrion® Monitor Work?

Step 1: Intelligent Baselining Process

Key in your URL into our WebOrion® Monitor dashboard to kickstart the intelligent baseline process. This process automatically filters out dynamic content, reducing the need for human intervention to whitelist content which frequently changes.

Step 2: Visual Defacement Monitoring

With the Image Analytics Engine, users can select which regions of a webpage to monitor for changes.

Step 3: Setting up Alerts

The last step is simply deciding who in the company should receive notifications should there be a change.

Conclusion

As building trust online becomes even more important to brands, Magnolia DXP and Cloudsine are committed to providing them with robust security solutions. By including WebOrion® Monitor in DX Cloud’s advanced security package, businesses can monitor all unauthorized activity on their websites to successfully combat web defacement and keep their brand’s integrity intact.

Learn more about Cloudsine’s WebOrion® Monitor here.