Online Brand Impersonation, a significant cybersecurity use case, is a deceptive tactic where a malicious actor falsely represents a legitimate company, its services, or its employees online. This is done to trick customers, partners, or employees into revealing sensitive information, making fraudulent payments, or downloading malware.

The primary goal of brand impersonation is to exploit the trust associated with the brand for financial gain, credential theft, or reputational damage. It can manifest across various external digital platforms, including:

• Domain Spoofing (Cybersquatting/Typosquatting): Registering domains with slight misspellings or variations of a brand's actual domain (e.g., brand-login.com instead of brand.com) to host fake websites for phishing.

• Phishing Emails: Sending emails that mimic a brand's communications, often claiming an urgent issue (e.g., "Your account has been frozen"), to get recipients to click a malicious link or provide login credentials.

• Fake Social Media Accounts: Creating fraudulent profiles on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram to run fake contests, spread misinformation, or solicit private data from followers.

• Malicious Mobile Apps: Publishing rogue mobile applications in official or unofficial app stores that use the brand's logo and design to trick users into downloading them, often to steal credentials.

How ThreatNG Helps with Online Brand Impersonation

ThreatNG, as an all-in-one External Attack Surface Management and Digital Risk Protection solution, provides comprehensive capabilities to detect, assess, and prioritize brand impersonation threats.

External Discovery

ThreatNG can perform purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors. This is the foundational step for brand impersonation defense, as it maps the public-facing digital assets where impersonation can occur.

• Example: It continuously scans the internet for newly registered domains that are visually similar to the legitimate company's domain, identifying potential phishing sites being set up before they go live.

External Assessment

ThreatNG performs various external assessments that directly address brand impersonation risks:

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This score is derived from Domain Intelligence (including DNS Intelligence and Domain Name Permutations) and Email Intelligence (which includes email security presence and format prediction).

  • Example: By identifying Domain Name Permutations (like substitutions, hyphenations, or TLD-swaps) that are Available and Taken (e.g., detecting mycompanysupport.net which is taken, while the official is mycompany.com), ThreatNG can flag domains being used for phishing. It also checks the brand's primary domain for weak Email Intelligence, such as missing DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records, which makes it easy for attackers to spoof a legitimate email address.

• Brand Damage Susceptibility: This utilizes attack surface and digital risk intelligence, encompassing Sentiment and Financials (such as Lawsuits and Negative News), as well as Domain Intelligence.

  • Example: The presence of negative news or lawsuits can make a brand a more attractive target for reputation-damaging impersonations. ThreatNG would flag this context alongside newly discovered suspicious assets.

• Mobile App Exposure: This evaluates an organization’s mobile apps by discovering them in marketplaces and checking their contents.

  • Example: It detects the presence of unauthorized mobile apps that use the brand's identity on various app stores (Amazon Appstore, Google Play, Apple App Store, etc.).

Reporting

ThreatNG offers specialized reports that consolidate brand impersonation findings for immediate action:

• Prioritized Report: This report highlights newly detected typosquatted domains or fake social media accounts as High or Medium risk, ensuring security teams focus on the most critical brand threats.

• Ransomware Susceptibility Report: This includes a factor from Dark Web Presence regarding compromised credentials, which could be used to impersonate employees for BEC (Business Email Compromise) or to spread ransomware links under the brand's guise.

Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG performs continuous monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings of all organizations. This is essential because impersonation threats can emerge rapidly, such as through a new domain registration or a new fake social media profile. Continuous monitoring ensures a real-time defense, allowing for rapid response and takedown efforts.

Investigation Modules

The Investigation Modules provide the granular data necessary to validate and understand a potential impersonation threat:

• Domain Intelligence: This module is central to combating phishing/cybersquatting.

  • Example: It details Domain Name Permutations, which include types like homoglyphs (characters that look alike but are different) and bitsquatting. When a suspicious domain is found, DNS Intelligence provides the associated IP address and Mail Record, offering evidence of a malicious setup.

• Dark Web Presence: This feature tracks organizational mentions and Associated Compromised Credentials.

  • Example: If credentials for an executive are found on the dark web, ThreatNG can flag this, indicating a high risk of executive impersonation (CEO fraud) via email, which is a severe form of brand impersonation.

• Social Media: This proactively safeguards the organization by closing the "Narrative Risk" gap, turning publicly discussed flaws and threat actor plans (the Conversational Attack Surface) into protective intelligence.

  • Example: Reddit Discovery functions as a Digital Risk Protection system that identifies and mitigates threats (like a coordinated discussion about a phishing scam targeting the brand) before they escalate into a public crisis, providing an early warning intelligence system.

• Mobile Application Discovery: This module specifically discovers mobile apps in marketplaces.

  • Example: If a fake app is discovered, this module not only identifies its presence but also scans the app's contents for exposed information like Access Credentials (e.g., Stripe API Key) or Security Credentials, confirming its malicious nature.

Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)

ThreatNG’s continuously updated Intelligence Repositories provide the threat context needed to assess impersonation risks:

• Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web): Provides insight into where attackers might plan or discuss brand impersonation campaigns.

• Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): A database of compromised credentials vital for detecting potential internal impersonation attempts, like BEC scams that use stolen employee accounts.

• ESG Violations (DarCache ESG): Discovered ESG violations can be a hook for attackers to craft highly believable, personalized, or urgent impersonation scams.

Working with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's deep external visibility and actionable intelligence can be used with other security solutions to enhance the brand impersonation defense lifecycle.

• Brand Protection & Takedown Platforms: ThreatNG's Domain Intelligence would quickly find and validate a typosquatted domain (e.g., paypal-login.com instead of paypal.com) with a high-priority alert. This precise intelligence—including the domain's registration and IP details—can then be directly fed into a Brand Protection & Takedown Platform. This allows the complementary solution to execute an immediate, targeted legal takedown request, bypassing lengthy manual verification and significantly speeding up the removal of the fraudulent site.

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring detects a sudden spike in Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture) tied to the organization's employees. This high-severity alert can be automatically sent to the organization's SIEM/SOAR system. The complementary SOAR platform can ingest this external data and trigger an automated internal response, such as instantly forcing password resets for the exposed accounts and blocking all outbound emails from those accounts until the passwords are changed, thereby proactively stopping an Executive Impersonation or BEC attack.