IMPROVEMENT OF METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF BRAND PROTECTION IN CYBERSPACE

The main purpose of this scientific work is to improve the theoretical and methodological foundations of ensuring data protection in cyberspace in the direction of forming a brand protection system to increase its level of recognition, strengthen reputation and increase brand capital as factors of competitive advantages of the organization for the long run.In order to achieve the purpose, general scientific and special research methods have been used in the article, the main of which were the methods of scientific abstraction, generalization and synthesis, analytical diagnostics, descriptive statistics and the index-criterion method. Method of system analysis has been used in the research in order to comprehensively characterize the main aspects of brand protection in the information environment. Methods of steganographic protection of information, areas of their use and requirements for the characteristics of steganographic methods are considered.The importance for companies to carefully research the issues of ensuring a brand image in the environment of a potential target audience by tracking manifestations of abuse of public opinion and a positive attitude towards the brand in order to ensure a high image level, the business reputation of the organization's branding policy, increase the level of data protection in the virtual space, as well as satisfaction and trust of the target audience for the long term are substantiated. Selection and justification of the coefficient of importance and evaluation criteria of steganographic methods, which were chosen and justified for use in ensuring cyber protection of the brand (stability, invisibility, security, complexity of embedding and extracting information). There was carried out the calculation of the weight characteristics in relation to the selected methods of hiding information to ensure cyber protection of the brand.It was established that in a comprehensive comparison of information embedding methods for use in steganographic applications designed to increase brand cyber protection, the best result was shown by integrated methods based on discrete wavelet transformation and discrete cosine transformation.