SIX automates key cybersecurity tasks to actively protect itself against social media threats
Switzerland is known around the world for its strong and reliable finance industry. As a key platform for that industry, SIX must protect its brand, business, and clients from fake news, spoof accounts, hacking, and other threats. The consequences of not doing so could be disastrous.
The company found the answer in a fully integrated social media management platform that proactively polices their brand on social.
Integrating a variety of social media security tools into one dashboard to identify and deal with threats.
SIX is a Zurich-based financial technology service provider that operates Switzerland's financial market infrastructure. The company delivers services to its user base of 130 banks in the areas of securities trading, clearing and settlement, financial information, and payment transactions.
- 30-40automated alerts a month generated
- 1-2non-compliant content takedowns a month made possible
- < 24 hrcontent takedown time achieved
What they did
Making it easier to protect against cyberthreats
Cyberthreats present an ever-present danger for companies like SIX—especially in the age of social media, which needs to be monitored around the clock. The nature of their business makes finance companies in particular a prime target for hackers and other cybercriminals. With 4,200 employees, SIX needs to keep a close eye out for unauthorized profiles and other threats. The specific challenges facing SIX include protecting against:
Targeted phishing attacks
PR crises that can quickly spiral out of control
Financial fraud and misinformation
Compliance breaches in a highly regulated industry
Fake news and other malicious content
Spoof or unauthorized profiles
Corporate account hacking
For SIX, the consequences of not adequately protecting its social media accounts against these and other threats cannot be understated. Starkly put, if SIX’s financial marketplace goes down because of a security issue or cyberattack, the whole Swiss financial marketplace goes down. And fake news can adversely affect stock values and cost billions of dollars, not to mention damage to reputations.
In 2016, SIX decided to extend its security measures group-wide, with a focus on social media. The company turned to Hootsuite and its integrated ecosystem of specialized social media tools to provide the robust social media protection it needed.
How they did it
Creating a social media compliance hub
After an audit, SIX found that its existing social media management platform wasn’t efficient or scalable enough for an organization that prides itself on a reputation for reliability, security, and quality.
SIX chose to work with Hootsuite Enterprise, and made Hootsuite the compliance hub for social media. They quickly set about addressing issues they had found during their audit, including:
Gain the ability to identify and delete unauthorized profiles, such as someone pretending to work for the company or an employee posting about the company
Make it easier to regulate access to social media accounts
Establish clear social media workflow and content approval processes
Help their social team more efficiently monitor relevant conversations on social media
After an audit of official and unofficial accounts, SIX closed 80 unofficial accounts—including dozens of fake Facebook accounts.
Building a collaborative social media team
SIX rolled out Hootsuite across four departments, setting up workflows for approvals and crisis management, and providing support to help teams identify potentially damaging fraud.Social media team members can now assign tasks within the four departments if they see important social media conversations or content that need to be addressed. If necessary, the team can use Hootsuite to engage in these conversations. Everyone has full visibility of what’s going on in the dashboard at all times.For SIX, a major benefit of using Hootsuite was the ability to integrate two powerful security and brand monitoring tools—ZeroFOX and Brandwatch—to proactively monitor social media account security.
Using Brandwatch to monitor social conversations
Brandwatch is a social listening tool used for reputation management. Like ZeroFOX, it is seamlessly integrated into Hootsuite and alerts SIX about the social buzz around the company and its industry.Brandwatch flags brand mentions, alerting the team any time SIX is mentioned so they can respond appropriately. It also helps them track positive and negative brand sentiment, giving them insight into topics their community is discussing and helping them plan their content strategy. And it enables the team to monitor a wide range of topics and keywords for potential red flags, positioning them to quickly respond to potential PR crises.In the event of any crisis, the social media team can now be involved immediately so they can use Hootsuite to monitor and report on the crisis in real time. They can also monitor hashtags and keywords around the crisis.
We set up each of four department’s teams within Hootsuite. This enables them to collaborate within the platform, and use Brandwatch and ZeroFOX, from one dashboard. With the alerts through ZeroFOX in the Hootsuite dashboard, we detected a large number of fake accounts we had no idea existed. Now, if a threat is found, we just push a button and the whole thing gets solved.
Putting training at the center of their social strategy
SIX recognized early on that providing the right training and ongoing support would be key to the success of their new social media management platform rollout.The onboarding phase for Hootsuite Enterprise included web-based end-user and admin training sessions, as well as interactive practical training led by the Hootsuite team at the SIX offices in Zurich. ZeroFOX also participated in the on-site kick-off for this partnership and delivered further training to help the SIX team protect the company brand and their clients on social. This included security best practices for keeping both corporate and employee social media accounts safe from cybercriminals and scammers.Brandwatch and ZeroFOX also ran focused web-based training sessions around how to best use their tools. The SIX team now offers ongoing internal training, including video training on social media guidelines.
The results
When it came to brand protection, SIX had three main social media goals that influenced their thinking around platform partner selection and what they needed to do to stay secure on social:
Build and maintain brand awareness and credibility
Avoid social PR crises
Quickly and effectively resolve customer service issues
Integrating ZeroFOX and Brandwatch within the Hootsuite Enterprise platform gave SIX the protection they needed. SIX social team members across various departments now see the same ZeroFOX and Brandwatch streams in Hootsuite, allowing them to keep on top of potential threats at all times.
Moving from reactive to active crisis management
Actively monitoring the company’s social media accounts for issues has made SIX’s customer support much more efficient. The team, which now has full control of all the company’s social accounts, receives 30 to 40 automated alerts a month and triggers one to two content takedowns a month—usually within 24 hours of requesting a takedown from the social network.Automating essential security tasks, such as finding fake profiles and monitoring brand mentions, has freed up the team to focus on engaging with customers and building relationships on social media.In fact, they have since seen a 20 percent increase in engagement on LinkedIn—one of their most important channels—since implementing Hootsuite.
Products used in this study
