The First Sign of Brand Abuse
Most organisations have their first encounter with brand abuse the same way: someone in customer support gets an email from a confused customer. They’ve clicked a link, lost money, or suspect they’ve had their information harvested. You take a look at the site, see it’s fake and ask the next logical question.
What can I do about this?
If your first instinct is to roll up your sleeves and handle it internally (including asking lots of questions to our well educated LLM friends), I don’t blame you. Nobody wants to spend money on a something that feels uncertain, let alone a service you didn’t know existed prior to jumping on Google – especially when you’re running lean or focused on critical business outcomes.
Those of us who work in brand protection, and cybersecurity more generally, know that by the time you’ve seen one instance of a scam targeting your brand, there are almost certainly others you haven’t seen yet.
Handling this internally may feel like you’re doing enough to address the incident, but in reality it’s like slapping a Band-Aid on an infected wound.
What Does DIY Look Like?
For many teams, DIY brand protection can look like this:
A customer reports a scam or phishing site
Someone at your company manually investigates and confirms it’s fake
You find an abuse form on the website of the registrar or hosting provider
You fill out the form and wait for a response
If we make the broad assumption that this domain was an open and shut case of DNS abuse, and assuming the registrar is compliant and the case is taken down promptly, this may feel like you’ve solved the issue.
However, those who try themselves often find that registrars become unresponsive and dismiss their cases without explanation. Or, if a takedown has been submitted to the hosting provider, the cyber criminals just pick up and moved the DNS to a new provider, leaving you chasing your tail.
Takedowns Aren’t the Only Problem
While submitting an abuse form is easy, what makes the takedown aspect of brand protection difficult is triaging the case to identify the best pathway for enforcement, and having the ability to expedite submissions so yours doesn’t sit at the bottom of a pile that is thousands of cases long.
Detecting scams is a different beast entirely.
Scammers don’t exactly announce their campaigns and often won’t even register domain names with your exact brand name in the string. They will instead register variations of your brand name, unrelated strings that still look credible, while sometimes even using personal-sounding domains that make them impossible to flag with simple filters.
To catch these threats consistently, you need to :
Ingest data from multiple sources including: domain and subdomain registrations, social media platforms, advertisements, apps and fraud feeds.
Run daily (or even hourly) queries against those data sources to detect new instances of abuse.
Use pattern recognition to correlate signals that uncover multiple threats stood up as part of the same campaign.
Prioritise cases so you aren’t wasting time on low impact noise.
That level of visibility and automation are exactly what specialist brand protection solutions are built for, often pulling hundreds of thousands of data points from the open web and proprietary sources every day.
Being Reactive and the Psychology Behind Scams
Let’s say you decide your resources are best spent only responding to customer reports of scams. On the surface that seems reasonable as you’re only dealing with an issue when it’s already affecting someone right?
The catch is that most abuse never gets reported. Customers might notice that something feels off and just walk away. They might quietly dispute a charge with their bank. They might assume someone else will report it. What’s often forgotten is that there is concrete behavioural evidence showing that scam victims often don’t speak up even when they’ve been harmed.
Research into the mental health impacts of internet scams finds that victims can experience prolonged shame, embarrassment and social isolation after being deceived, which contributes to reluctance to disclose the incident to others or report it formally.
When DIY Makes Sense, and When it Doesn’t
To be clear, a DIY approach to brand protection CAN be sufficient if:
You’ve had one isolated incident.
There are no signs of broader impersonation or repeat attacks.
Your support team has visibility into customer complaints and can act quickly.
You team has the time and resources to devote towards manual detection, triage and takedown of scams.
But if you start seeing repeated reports, ads appearing in search or social media, or are submitting takedowns that aren’t getting actioned quickly, if at all, you’ve reached a point where reactive measures are not enough.
Final Thoughts
It’s worth reframing how brand protection is viewed internally. It’s easy to see it as an added line item in your budget that needs justification. In reality, the cost is already being paid elsewhere – in support time spent investigating incidents, in delayed responses while abuse stays live, and in customers quietly losing trust in your brand.
Outsourcing part or all of your brand protection doesn’t mean you’re handing over responsibility, rather that you’re acknowledging the reality of the modern threat landscape – the amount of threat data available is too large and traditional takedown paths are too inefficient for manual processes to keep up.
About brandsec
brandsec is a team of highly experienced domain name management and online brand protection experts. We provide corporate domain name management and brand enforcement services, helping brands eliminate phishing platforms across the internet. Supporting some of the largest brands in the region, we offer innovative solutions to combat threats across multiple industries.
