Brandjacking

Brandjacking, in the context of cybersecurity, is a malicious act where an unauthorized party impersonates a well-known or established brand to deceive customers, partners, or the general public for illicit gain. It is essentially a form of identity theft targeting the entire corporate identity, not just an individual.

Key Characteristics and Methods

The primary goal of brandjacking is to misappropriate the trust and reputation a brand has built. The perpetrators, often referred to as "brandjackers," achieve this by creating convincing fakes of the brand's online presence or communications.

• Domain Name Misuse: This often involves cybersquatting or typosquatting, where brandjackers register domain names that are slight misspellings of the official brand website (e.g., micros0ft.com instead of microsoft.com) or variations that consumers might logically try (e.g., [brandname]support.com).

• Social Media Impersonation: This is a prevalent method today, where fake accounts are created on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram, often using the brand's logo, colors, and official-looking content to trick followers into believing they are interacting with the legitimate company.

• Phishing and Spoofing: Brandjackers send out emails or text messages that appear to originate from the brand. These messages often prompt recipients to click a link or provide sensitive information, leveraging the brand's identity to make the request seem legitimate (e.g., a "security alert" from a major bank).

• Counterfeit Products and Websites: This involves setting up sophisticated e-commerce websites that mimic the brand's official site and sell fake, often low-quality, products under the brand's name. This not only defrauds consumers but also damages the brand's reputation for quality.

Impact of Brandjacking

The consequences of a successful brandjacking attack are significant and multifaceted, affecting a company's finances, operations, and public perception.

• Financial Loss: This includes lost revenue from customers tricked into buying counterfeit goods or funds stolen through phishing scams, as well as the high cost of legal action and mitigation efforts.

• Reputation Damage: Perhaps the most severe impact, brandjacking erodes customer trust. If a customer has a poor experience with a fake product or a scam, they often blame the legitimate brand, causing long-term damage to the company's image and credibility.

• Security Risks: The use of brand-impersonating tactics is often a precursor to larger security breaches, as it allows attackers to collect credentials, install malware, or gather proprietary information from employees or partners who believe they are communicating with the authentic brand.

In essence, brandjacking is a deceptive strategy that weaponizes a company's goodwill and brand equity for criminal purposes.

Brandjacking, as a specific type of digital risk, involves the unauthorized use of a brand's identity to deceive, steal, or distribute counterfeit goods. ThreatNG is well-equipped to detect and help mitigate the risks that lead to brandjacking by continuously monitoring the external digital attack surface.

ThreatNG's Role in Combating Brandjacking

ThreatNG provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to address brandjacking, focusing on external discovery, detailed assessment, continuous monitoring, and actionable intelligence.

External Discovery and Assessment

ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to identify all associated assets without needing internal connectors. This outsider's perspective is critical for finding the types of assets an attacker would create to impersonate a brand.

The discovery then feeds into several external assessment security ratings, two of which are directly relevant to brandjacking:

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Security Rating: This assessment identifies key vulnerabilities that brandjackers often use to launch email-based attacks.

  • BEC/Phishing Example: ThreatNG checks for Domain Name Permutations that are both available and already taken. If a brandjacker has registered a lookalike domain (e.g., mycompnay.com instead of mycompany.com), ThreatNG flags the taken permutation. If an attacker is planning a future attack, ThreatNG could identify an available permutation that should be registered by the legitimate company immediately.

  • The rating also includes Domain Name Record Analysis, explicitly pointing out missing DMARC and SPF records. These email authentication records are essential for preventing email spoofing, a core component of phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) brandjacking attempts.

• Brand Damage Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating focuses broadly on risks that damage a brand's reputation, which includes many of the outcomes of a successful brandjacking campaign.

  • Brand Damage Example: This assessment again checks for Domain Name Permutations (available and taken) and Web3 Domains (available and taken), which are high-value targets for brandjacking. If a Web3 domain like brandname.eth this is available, registering it prevents an attacker from claiming it to launch a new type of crypto-scam brandjacking. If it's already taken, it is flagged as a potential risk.

  • It also considers Negative News and Lawsuits, providing context for how current public perception may be influenced by or related to a brandjacking incident.

Continuous Monitoring and Reporting

ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings of all organizations. This is vital because brandjacking threats are dynamic; a new lookalike domain or fake social media account can be created at any moment. Continuous monitoring ensures new risks are immediately flagged.

The resulting data is compiled into various reports, including Security Ratings (A-F) and Prioritized Reports (High, Medium, Low, and Informational). This helps security teams and executives understand the severity of identified brandjacking risks and allocate resources to address the most critical threats first. For instance, a report might prioritize a High-risk finding of a typosquatted domain that has a mail record, indicating an active phishing threat.

Investigation Modules and Intelligence Repositories

ThreatNG uses several dedicated Investigation Modules powered by extensive Intelligence Repositories (DarCache) to find and analyze brandjacking attempts:

• Domain Intelligence: This module is central to fighting brandjacking. It uses Domain Name Permutations to uncover lookalike domains through various manipulations, such as substitutions, insertions, and TLD swaps. It can check for their existence using mail records and IP addresses.

  • Domain Intelligence Example: For a brand, say "AcmeCorp," the system would identify and track domains like acmecorp.net (TLD swap), acmecorp-login.com (keyword addition), or acmencorp.com (insertion). It also performs Web3 Domain Discovery and Identification to proactively identify available and taken Web3 domains, mitigating brand impersonation risks in this emerging space.

• Social Media Investigation Module: This module proactively addresses "Narrative Risk" and the "Human Attack Surface".

  • Social Media Example: The Username Exposure module performs a passive reconnaissance scan to see if a username is available or taken across a wide range of social media platforms and high-risk forums. Suppose a brand's key executive's name is available on a high-risk forum. In that case, the brand can take steps to secure it to prevent an attacker from creating a fake profile to launch a social engineering brandjacking attack.

• Intelligence Repositories (DarCache): ThreatNG's constantly updated repositories provide the data context necessary for accurate risk scoring.

  • The DarCache Dark Web and DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials) repositories help identify if compromised credentials associated with the brand are being bought or sold, which could be used by brandjackers to facilitate their attacks.

  • The DarCache ESG Violations repository contributes to the Brand Damage Susceptibility rating by tracking publicly disclosed offenses that may compound the reputational harm of a brandjacking incident.

Cooperation with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's focus on external, unauthenticated discovery and assessment complements internal security tools.

• Complementary Solutions Example 1 (Ticketing/Remediation): When ThreatNG identifies a High risk due to a missing DMARC record or a compromised credential, it provides all the necessary context, reasoning, and practical recommendations. This high-fidelity information can be used to automatically or manually create a ticket in an IT Service Management or security ticketing system, such as ServiceNow or Jira (listed as technologies in the technology stack), for the internal team to implement the fix.

• Complementary Solutions Example 2 (Security Orchestration): If the Domain Intelligence module detects a new, taken Domain Name Permutation actively spoofing the brand, an external Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform could use this intelligence to automatically trigger an external takedown or cease-and-desist process with a domain registrar or hosting provider.