PARTNERING WITH MAJOR CLOUD PROVIDERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS, BRANCH ACTIVELY COMBATS SURVEILLANCE-FOR-HIRE INDUSTRY

Branch's Growing Investment in Abuse Mitigation Addresses Industry-wide Challenges

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Branch, the leader in mobile linking and measurement, recently featured as a key partner in combating multinational phishing campaigns. In collaboration with Meta, as highlighted in their Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry released yesterday, Branch's market-leading anti-abuse capabilities assisted in the takedown of a sophisticated surveillance-for-hire threat actor.

"Branch is a critical partner to major cloud providers and social media networks in the ongoing fight against bad actors like surveillance-for-hire companies," said Jamie Fullerton, Head of Security, Branch. "This sort of collaboration is an example of the importance of a whole-of-society response to tackling this growing, malicious industry."

Branch has identified and removed thousands of abusive links since 2019, and this response is just the latest example of Branch's ongoing, collaborative efforts alongside major cloud providers and social media networks to combat this society-wide challenge. Branch's extensive work helps enable the industry to stay ahead of the curve as malicious parties continue improving their techniques.

Upon identification of misuse of the Branch platform by bad actors, including surveillance-for-hire companies, Branch immediately takes action to remove abusive links and deactivate accounts. In the specific example featured in Meta's report, CyberRoot Risk Advisory Private, based in India, abused the Branch platform to create, manage and track links with the goal of driving traffic to malicious websites. Within 24 hours, upon notification from Meta's Threat Disruption team, Branch ran the pattern through its proprietary, in-house abuse detection controls and directly eliminated all 16 malicious links associated with this threat actor.

Among other extensive measures to address phishing, Branch provides a reporting channel for those who have seen the Branch platform being used for phishing, via the Report a Phishing Attempt section on their security reporting page. If you suspect abuse for an app.link URL, please help Branch in combating this society-wide challenge by notifying them of the abuse of their platform.

Branch provides the industry's leading mobile linking and measurement platforms, unifying user experience and attribution across devices and channels. Branch has been selected by over 100,000 apps since 2014 including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp and many more, improving experiences for more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe.

PR contact: Paula Mantle, press@branch.io

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SOURCE Branch