As more organizations adopt DMARC and implement domain-based protections, a new threat vector has moved into focus: brand impersonation. Attackers are registering domains that closely resemble legitimate brands, using them to host phishing sites, send deceptive emails, and mislead users with cloned login pages and familiar visual assets.
In 2024, over 30,000 lookalike domains were identified impersonating major global brands, with a third of those confirmed as actively malicious. These campaigns are rarely technically sophisticated. Instead, they rely on the nuances of trust: a name that appears familiar, a logo in the right place, or an email sent from a domain that’s nearly indistinguishable from the real one.
Yet while the tactics are simple, defending against them is not. Most organizations still lack the visibility and context needed to detect and respond to these threats with confidence.
The scale and speed of impersonation risk
Registering a lookalike domain is quick and inexpensive. Attackers routinely purchase domains that differ from legitimate ones by a single character, a hyphen, or a change in top-level domain (TLD). These subtle variations are difficult to detect, especially on mobile devices or when users are distracted.
| Lookalike Domain | Tactic Used |
|---|---|
| acmebаnk.com | Homograph (Cyrillic ‘a’) |
| acme-bank.com | Hyphenation |
| acmebanc.com | Character substitution |
| acmebank.co | TLD change |
| acmebank-login.com | Word append |
In one recent example, attackers created a convincing lookalike of a well-known logistics platform and used it to impersonate freight brokers and divert real shipments. The resulting fraud led to operational disruption and substantial losses, with industry estimates for comparable attacks ranging from $50,000 to over $200,000 per incident. While registering the domain was simple, the resulting operational and financial fallout was anything but.
While any one domain may seem low risk in isolation, the true challenge lies in scale. These domains are often short-lived, rotated frequently, and difficult to track.
For defenders, the sheer volume and variability of lookalikes makes them resource-intensive to investigate. Monitoring the open internet is time-consuming and often inconclusive — especially when every domain must be analyzed to assess whether it poses real risk.
From noise to signal: Making brand impersonation data actionable
The challenge for security teams is not the absence of data — it’s the overwhelming presence of raw, unqualified signals. Thousands of domains are registered daily that could plausibly be used in impersonation campaigns. Some are harmless, many are not, but distinguishing between them is far from straightforward.
Tools like threat feeds and registrar alerts surface potential risks but often lack the context needed to make informed decisions. Keyword matches and registration patterns alone don’t reveal whether a domain is live, malicious, or targeting a specific organization.
As a result, teams face an operational bottleneck. They aren’t just managing alerts — they’re sorting through ambiguity, without enough structure to prioritize what matters.
What’s needed is a way to turn raw domain data into clear, prioritized signals that integrate with the way security teams already assess, triage, and respond.
Expanding coverage beyond the domain you own
Cisco has long helped organizations prevent exact-domain spoofing through DMARC, delivered via Red Sift OnDMARC. But as attackers move beyond the domain you own, Cisco has expanded its domain protection offering to include Red Sift Brand Trust, a domain and brand protection application designed to monitor and respond to lookalike domain threats at global scale.
Red Sift Brand Trust brings structured visibility and response to a traditionally noisy and hard-to-interpret space. Its core capabilities include:
- Internet-scale lookalike detection using visual, phonetic, and structural analysis to surface domains designed to deceive
- AI-powered asset detection to identify branded assets being used in phishing infrastructure
- Infrastructure intelligence that surfaces IP ownership and risk indicators
- First-of-its-kind autonomous AI Agent that acts as a virtual analyst, mimicking human review to classify lookalike domains and highlight takedown candidates with speed and confidence; read how it works
- Integrated escalation workflows that let security teams take down malicious sites quickly
With both Red Sift OnDMARC and Brand Trust now available through Cisco’s SolutionsPlus program, security teams can adopt a unified, scalable approach to domain and brand protection. This marks an important shift for a threat landscape that increasingly involves infrastructure beyond the organization’s control, where the brand itself is often the point of entry.
For more information on Domain Protection, please visit Redsift’s Cisco partnership page.
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