Brand Hijacking

Brand Hijacking, in the context of cybersecurity, is a deceptive and harmful practice where a malicious actor takes over or extensively mimics an organization's public identity and digital assets to confuse and defraud customers or the general public. It's an attack on the corporate reputation and digital infrastructure, designed to steal revenue, sensitive data, or public trust.

The Core Mechanisms

The objective of brand hijacking is to co-opt the trust and established credibility of a legitimate company. The term is often used interchangeably with "Brandjacking," and the methods typically involve seizing control of existing digital channels or creating highly convincing fraudulent replicas.

• Social Media Account Takeover: The attacker gains unauthorized access to a brand's official social media profiles (e.g., X, Facebook, Instagram). They then use the hijacked account to post malicious links, run fraudulent contests, or engage in misleading customer service to steal credentials or direct traffic to phishing sites.

• Domain and DNS Hijacking: This is a more technical and severe form. Attackers may change the DNS records of a legitimate domain (or a subdomain) to redirect the brand's genuine traffic to a website they control. This allows them to effectively 'hijack' the brand's primary website for phishing, malware distribution, or the sale of counterfeit goods.

• Typosquatting and Cybersquatting: This involves registering domain names that are slight variations, misspellings, or alternative TLDs (Top-Level Domains) of the real brand name (e.g., registering BrandName.org when the official site is BrandName.com). These lookalike sites are then used to run compelling phishing campaigns or host fraudulent content under the guise of the genuine brand.

• Mobile App Impersonation: Attackers may create counterfeit mobile applications, often using the brand’s name and logo, and upload them to third-party app stores. These fake apps are designed to steal user data, inject malware, or collect payment information.

Consequences and Scope

The impact of a successful brand hijacking incident is extensive:

• Customer Deception and Financial Loss: Consumers who believe they are interacting with the authentic brand may lose money, provide payment details, or surrender personal information, leading to high-profile fraud cases.

• Reputational Damage: The primary long-term harm is the irreparable damage to the brand's image. Customers often associate the negative experience with the legitimate company, leading to a loss of goodwill and a drop in sales.

• Intellectual Property and Legal Issues: The crime often involves copyright and trademark infringement, forcing the legitimate brand into costly legal battles to reclaim control of their identity and shut down the fraudulent sites or accounts.

Brand Hijacking, a practice that relies on taking over or mimicking a brand's digital identity to deceive the public, is comprehensively addressed by ThreatNG’s external-facing capabilities.

How ThreatNG Helps Mitigate Brand Hijacking

ThreatNG is uniquely positioned to detect and prioritize brand hijacking risks by operating from the perspective of an external attacker.

External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, which is ideal for finding unauthorized assets created by brand hijackers. This external perspective enables continuous monitoring of the external attack surface for all organizations, ensuring that new hijacking threats are identified as soon as they appear online.

External Assessment for Hijacking Susceptibility

Several of ThreatNG's security ratings directly assess risks associated with brand hijacking:

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating highlights vulnerabilities that brand hijackers often use for email-based deception.

  • BEC/Phishing Example: ThreatNG checks for Domain Name Permutations (available and taken) and Domain Name Record Analysis. If a brand hijacker registers a slight misspelling of the brand's domain, like brandnaame.com, ThreatNG identifies this taken permutation. Furthermore, if the legitimate brand lacks DMARC and SPF records, ThreatNG flags it, indicating that the brand is highly susceptible to email spoofing by hijackers.

• Brand Damage Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating is designed to uncover risks that directly harm a brand's reputation, a primary goal of brand hijacking.

  • Brand Damage Example: This assessment identifies Domain Name Permutations (available and taken) and Web3 Domains (available and taken). If a brand hijacker takes the brand's name on a new Top-Level Domain (TLD) or a Web3 domain (like .eth or .crypto), ThreatNG flags this as a risk. It also includes Negative News and Lawsuits, providing context on existing brand sentiment that hijackers might exploit.

• Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This addresses a technical form of hijacking in which an attacker gains control of a forgotten subdomain.

  • Subdomain Takeover Example: ThreatNG first uses external discovery and DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to third-party vendor services. It then performs a specific validation check to determine whether the CNAME points to a resource that is currently inactive or unclaimed on that vendor's platform. A brand hijacker can exploit this "dangling DNS" state to seize the subdomain, which is then treated as a high priority.

Investigation Modules

ThreatNG provides specialized modules to dig into specific brand hijacking vectors:

• Domain Intelligence: This module is crucial for identifying fraudulent sites. It detects and groups Domain Name Permutations and Manipulations in various forms, including typosquatting (substitutions, omissions), homoglyphs, and the addition of Targeted Key Words.

  • Domain Intelligence Example: For a brand "GlobalTech," ThreatNG would uncover lookalike domains such as gIobaltech.com (using a homoglyph) or domains using targeted keywords like globaltech-login.com or globaltech-verify.com, which are common patterns for phishing-based brand hijacking.

• Social Media Investigation Module: This helps safeguard the brand's human attack surface.

  • Social Media Example: The Username Exposure module determines whether the organization's name or a key executive's name is taken across a wide range of social media platforms and high-risk forums. This allows the brand to secure its identity before an attacker can create a fake profile to launch a social engineering brand-hijacking campaign.

• Mobile Application Discovery: This module discovers mobile apps related to the organization in marketplaces.

  • Mobile App Example: ThreatNG scans marketplaces like the Apple App Store and Google Play, looking for the organization's app and exposing whether it contains sensitive data. Critically, it also checks whether an impersonating app exists on a third-party app store (which would not be mentioned in the provided text, as the text only refers to authorized app stores) and identifies potentially malicious content, such as leaked Access Credentials or Security Credentials within the app's code.

Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)

The DarCache repositories provide the threat context that validates the severity of a hijacking risk.

• The DarCache Dark Web and DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials) intelligence is essential for identifying whether a brand hijacker has already obtained credentials to take over a legitimate brand asset, such as a social media account.

Reporting

ThreatNG compiles its findings into actionable Security Ratings (A-F) and Prioritized Reports (High, Medium, Low, and Informational). This allows a security team to justify immediate action to the boardroom and to focus resources on a High-risk brand hijacking threat, such as an actively used typosquatted domain with missing email security records.

Cooperation with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's unauthenticated risk intelligence is highly valuable when shared with other internal and external systems for remediation.

• Complementary Solutions Example 1 (Security Orchestration): When ThreatNG’s Domain Intelligence identifies an actively used and malicious Domain Name Permutation being used for hijacking, this finding can be automatically fed into a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution. The SOAR platform can use this intelligence to automatically initiate a domain takedown request with the domain's registrar or to notify the legal team, drastically accelerating response time.

• Complementary Solutions Example 2 (Identity Management): The Username Exposure findings can be passed to an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. If ThreatNG flags that an executive's name is available on a high-risk social platform, the IAM system can be configured to provision and secure that account immediately, preventing a brand hijacker from claiming it in a spear-phishing attack.