Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Over 51% of the time, email attackers pretend to be one of the top 20 global brands, with Microsoft being the most common impersonation.
Picture this: one of your users receives an email that appears to be from a trusted partner or a commonly used service. The branding is accurate, the language is convincing, and the email seems legitimate. Without proper training and knowledge, they might click on a malicious link, risking your organization's security.
This is where proactive measures and well-informed employees make a difference. This article will review the main concepts behind brand impersonation, explain which industries are targeted the most, and provide helpful tips for protecting your brand and users from this cyber threat.
Understanding Brand Spoofing
Brand spoofing attacks are a rapidly evolving cyber threat utilizing various social engineering tactics to convince their victims that they are speaking with the actual brand. Here are a few examples of the most popular tactics:
- Domain spoofing: Cybercriminals can redirect traffic from a legitimate website to a fraudulent one through sophisticated tactics like domain name system (DNS) hacks.
- Lookalike domains: Most commonly used in phishing emails, this method involves registering a domain that closely resembles a legitimate one or adding a word like “support” at the end, hoping the victim will only give it a cursory look and fall into the trap.
- Spoofing via social media: Making believable profiles on most social media sites is extremely easy. Hackers build fake pages pretending to be employees of banks or tech support teams.
- Fake QR code: Criminals create realistic-looking flyers and posters, including fraudulent QR codes. They hand them out or hang them publicly, hoping people will scan them.
- Website spoofing: Cybercriminals will closely replicate a brand’s website and send it to their victims, hoping they don’t notice and enter their credentials to steal them.
- Callback scams: Phishing emails sometimes include a phone number to call back to make the scam seem legitimate, hoping the victim will not double-check to see if the number is legit before calling.
- Keyword hijacking: Hackers purchase ads on popular keywords to direct traffic to a spoofed website.
The Human Factor: How Brand Impersonation Targets Users
Brand impersonation leverages the trust consumers have with well-known company names. The finance, logistics, and software industries are often spoofed due to frequent transactions, shipping notifications, and technical support interactions. These human factors make these sectors prime targets for attackers.
With the advent of e-commerce, most people are often waiting for some kind of delivery. The anticipation of an item makes people less vigilant when they receive a message from a delivery company like DHL or Amazon and susceptible to clicking on the fraudulent tracking link.
Microsoft and Google remain popular spoofs because they are the two of the most popular brands in desktop and mobile computing. Many people would consider an email requesting an update from these brands an urgent, necessary click.
The recent trend for brand impersonation in the finance sector involves spoofing a large bank pretending to offer crypto or NFT investments. People struggling financially can easily fall prey to this attack, and recent economic trends have made it even more likely.
Combatting Brand Impersonation Attacks
Brand impersonations are different from other social engineering attacks. These attacks do not target a company’s systems; they target its employees.
While some technological measures can be taken against brand spoofing, it’s also crucial to make sure your users are educated on these cyber attacks with current and relevant awareness training.
This type of training is not one size fits all and should be personalized, but here are some elements that should be present in all programs:
- E-learning modules available on desktop and mobile, allowing users to complete the training at their convenience.
- Interactive quizzes to test employee knowledge retention.
- Gamification to keep the teaching fun and encourage friendly competition to reinforce cybersecurity knowledge and retention.
Choosing the Right Content Against Brand Spoofing
This cyber threat evolves and changes depending on current trends, such as cryptocurrency and the rise of specific social networks. Cybercriminals also exploit periods of economic instability and high unemployment to increase the success rate of brand impersonation.
To effectively combat these evolving threats, it’s crucial to keep your cybersecurity awareness training up to date. Here are some foundational topics to cover:
- How to recognize a fraudulent domain name
- Common grammar and spelling mistakes in an email pointing to brand impersonation
- URL analysis to detect spoofed websites
- Industry-specific brand impersonations to look out for
- Incident reporting and explaining to employees that mistakes happen but must be reported as soon as possible to give your security team the most time to assess the situation
Focusing on these areas can equip your employees with the necessary skills to identify and respond effectively to brand impersonation attempts.
Fighting Brand Impersonation with Technology
Brand impersonations can also be fought with various technological solutions with some success. This type of software is always best paired with user training, as relying on it might introduce risks of creating a false sense of security, ultimately causing even more damage.
Tools like suspicious email analysis (SEA) and the DMARC protocol can significantly reduce the number of fraudulent brand impersonation emails sent to a user’s inbox. Reducing the statistical chance of a mistake is always good, but it is even better if the users are still trained to recognize the few that slip by your defenses.
With advanced training to recognize domain or brand spoofs that can sneak into your users' online environment, your team will not only recognize and report these potential threats but also help SEA learn from every report your trained users make, improving its analysis with each report.
Checking for Impersonation
No company is too small to be potentially impersonated, especially if you operate in industries like finance. A robust social and online monitoring tool can help you track any trends about your brand. Take every question or complaint about an impersonation of your brand seriously.
In such an event, as with any cyber threat, transparency is key. If you hear any potential of your brand being used in a cyber threat, issue a press release and send an email to your client base with clear examples of the brand impersonation to slow down and eventually discourage the scammers.
Safeguarding Your Brand with Cybersecurity Awareness Training
Brand impersonations will likely remain a growing part of the cyber threat landscape. They are an efficient, scalable threat that is very popular with criminals. As with many other cyber scams, victims tend to feel too ashamed to report them when they happen.
Brand spoofing is a must-have in any cybersecurity awareness training program. Thankfully, these scams are relatively easy to spot once you learn the telltale signs most of them have.
Check out our security awareness training kit to see how to start or revamp your training program to include brand impersonation modules.