Brand Impersonation Protection

Overview

What is brand impersonation?

A brand impersonation attack typically involves an email that seems to come from a trusted source, such as a colleague or a familiar organization. These attacks dupe end users into providing sensitive information and/or clicking on links that download malicious content. And, when an organization’s own brand is used in an attack, brand impersonation chips away (or, in some cases, destroys) customers’ trust.

Defend your brand — and your customers — with Mimecast

Leverage Mimecast’s AI-based Brand Exploit Protect and DMARC Analyzer to monitor and respond to malicious brand impersonation attacks out in the web and through email.
Actively hunt for and rapidly take down impersonated websites, all day and all night.
Ensure every email sent to your customers, employees, or anyone else is authentic — 100% of the time.
Shut down loopholes exploited by cybercriminals to make the internet safer for your brand, your customers and your partners.

How It Works

Every time your brand is impersonated, your reputation is threatened

Not safeguarding a brand’s online presence opens the door to brand impersonation attacks that can irreparably damage customers, employees and suppliers — and pose existential risks to the brand. Traditional security measures fail to proactively defend what’s outside your perimeter. Mimecast’s brand impersonation solutions help you detect and neutralize brand impersonation attacks that prey on your hard-earned brand equity — even out on the wild world wide web.

Challenges & Solutions

Automatically stop elusive threats you can’t see, 24/7/365.

No one can stop a bad actor from registering a domain that clones your design and HTML, right down to the color scheme and logo. Impersonated sites constantly crop up and disappear, creating a moving target that’s nearly impossible to detect and neutralize with manual in-house services.

Mimecast’s Brand Exploit Protect uses specialized algorithms that never stop scanning the entire web for suspicious activity. And when impersonated pages are found, Mimecast uses APIs to automatically notify ISPs and take down confirmed malicious impersonation attacks within hours — sometimes only minutes. This automation saves you time, energy and more than $1.14 million over doing it yourself (according to Frost & Sullivan).

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You didn’t build your brand overnight. Don’t let it become bait.

Every way your brand digitally engages with stakeholders is bait for a brand impersonation attack. It’s distressingly easy for cybercriminals to steal your brand’s trust and use it to trick innocent victims into engaging with malicious impersonated emails and websites that harvest credentials, drop malware, incite fraud or exfiltrate data.

Customers expect digital interactions with the brands they trust to be safe. But brand impersonation is hard to detect. Attacks are elusive. Phishing sites come and go quickly, to skirt detection. Rapid takedown is vital but difficult — and costly — to achieve manually, if it can be done at all. And brands often don’t realize the extent of the problem until they start actively monitoring for it.

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Find out who’s using your email domains. Stop email impersonation in its tracks.

40% of consumers willingly click on email links from their favorite brands. But email has a tragic flaw: Without a rigorous email authentication strategy, anyone can spoof your brand’s domain to send malicious emails to your customers and partners. The DMARC email authentication protocol helps ensure that every email sent to your customers, employees, or anyone else, is authentic.

But DMARC can’t simply be switched on without risking legitimate emails being seen as spam or rejected, hurting the email communications you rely on. Let Mimecast do the work with DMARC Analyzer. It takes the complexity out of devising a plan of attack to weed out phishers and ensure everyone gets the legitimate information they need, when they need it.

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FAQs

How does brand impersonation work?

Cybercriminals use brand impersonation to mimic trusted brands, thus tricking innocent victims into engaging with a malicious platform, usually to harvest credentials, steal personal information, conduct fraud or launch malware. Brand impersonation is often effective because it preys on a consumer’s trusted relationship with a company they are familiar with.

What does brand impersonation look like?

Brand impersonation attacks often appear in spoofed emails or spoofed websites. Emails that appear to come from a legitimate domain might request urgent action from the recipient and include malicious attachments or manipulated links that direct users to fake websites. Spoofed websites might copy a real brand’s colors, images and coding to trick unsuspecting users. Other attack methods include:

Fake job advertisements that pose as a legitimate company on job sites or search engine ads.
Fake social media accounts that direct victims to malicious websites.
Search ad phishing, which spoof legitimate domains to appear in search engine results.
Vishing and SMShing attacks that appear to come from a real brand.

What are some ways to prevent brand impersonation?

The DMARC email authentication protocol, combined with third-party brand protection services such as Mimecast’s Brand Exploit Protect, are key to preventing brand impersonation. Both require strategic planning and ongoing monitoring to ensure thorough brand protection, which generally relies on careful collaboration between cybersecurity and marketing teams.

DMARC management

Get full visibility and control of who sends emails on your behalf by accelerating and simplifying implementation of the DMARC protocol.

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Brand protection

Safeguard your digital brand to protect employees, customers, and partners by identifying and blocking brand impersonation attacks exploiting websites similar to your own.

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Email Security, Cloud Gateway

Secure any type of email environment, even the most complex email environments and get highly customizable controls with this Secure Email Gateway in the cloud.

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