Brand threats account for 68% of fraud-related cyber-attacks and social media has become one of the most dangerous battlegrounds. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, over $1.03 trillion was lost to scams in 2024, with a significant portion tied to social media fraud and brand impersonation.
Unlike traditional cyberattacks that target internal infrastructure, brand threats live outside an organization’s control. They exploit public trust, using spoofed emails, fake mobile apps, and impersonated social accounts to mislead users and erode brand credibility.
The decentralized and fast-evolving nature of these attacks makes detection and response particularly challenging. Cybercriminals are quick to adopt new tactics, often outpacing traditional security approaches.
To effectively protect their brands and customers, organizations must move beyond reactive defenses. This piece outlines three strategic actions security teams should prioritize to better detect, investigate, and disrupt brand abuse:
- Adopt an intelligence-driven approach
- Partner with external organizations
- Engage in proactive operations
Brand Threat
A brand threat is any attack that exploits an organization’s trusted reputation to cause financial loss, reputational harm, or customer deception.
Today’s brand abuse takes many forms — from look-alike domains and fake mobile apps to impersonated social media accounts and malicious content on the open web. Threat actors rely on familiarity and visual deception to trick users into engaging with fraudulent assets, making brand protection a critical pillar of modern cybersecurity.
Adopt an Intelligence-Driven Approach
Phishing tactics evolve fast and travel even faster. Threat actors constantly adapt to trending topics and proven scams, making attacks more convincing and widespread. What works in one industry will inevitably spread to others.
To stay ahead, your security strategy needs broad visibility into emerging threats, whether they’re aimed at your sector or not. The best approach combines automated and human intelligence across the surface web, deep web, dark web, and social platforms to spot patterns early and take action before they reach your doorstep.
Effective threat detection starts with smart keyword strategy. Security teams should cast a wide net, tracking not only industry-specific terms but also adjacent keywords and common variations. For example, a financial institution should monitor terms like “banking,” “checking account,” and “savings,” in addition to brand-specific references.
Threat actors rarely use exact brand names. Instead, they often mask malicious content with strings of unrelated letters, numbers, or subtle misspellings. To surface real threats, organizations must filter, analyze, and prioritize these signals—combining automated tools with expert human review for accurate, high-confidence detection.
Collaborate with External Partners to Combat Brand Threats
Managing brand threats can quickly overwhelm security teams due to the sheer volume of potential abuse. Building relationships with multiple external providers is essential to extend your detection and mitigation capabilities.
Attackers exploit a variety of hosting services and social platforms to carry out their campaigns. Strong partnerships create vital communication channels to report abuse, gather necessary evidence, and enable providers to take effective action.
Security teams should prioritize building relationships with:
- Registrars
- Hosting providers
- Site operators
- App stores
- Social platforms
- NSPs
- CERTs
- Telcos
- Law enforcement
In addition to using external relationships to have malicious content removed, enterprises can leverage those relationships to likewise dismantle threat actors and their infrastructure. Similar to your organization, many service providers do not want malicious content occupying their environment and are willing to work with enterprises to have it removed.
Proactive Operations
Growing digital footprints make organizations prime targets for online brand abuse. Malicious actors can easily copy your logos, trademarked content, and sensitive information to deceive and exploit. To stay ahead, streamlined workflows, efficient processes, and beaconing technology are essential for timely and accurate attack detection.
Types of brand abuse on third-party sites may include:
- Illicit activity using your brand
- Abuse of intellectual property
- Unauthorized association
- Prohibited channel activity
- Traffic diversion using your brand name
Threat validation should be a combination of automated collection of brand-related data and analyst curation. By moving potential threats through a well-documented pipeline, organizations can devote more time pursuing mitigation of the threat and its infrastructure instead of triaging cases.
Monitoring and analysis for brand abuse should include:
- Continuous review of content indexed by search engines containing key terms
- Scoring of each flagged item
- Scored results should be reviewed for legitimacy
- Categorize and address each item
As brands increasingly depend on their online presence to grow, the risk of abuse grows alongside it. Brand impersonation can happen anywhere and cause lasting damage. To effectively safeguard your organization, security teams must embrace comprehensive intelligence gathering, build strong external partnerships, and take proactive, strategic action.
Learn more about how Fortra Brand Protection can break the attack chain of brand impersonation. Schedule a demo to see if we're the right fit for your organization.
