Brand Impersonation: Lookalike Domains, Typosquatting and Takedowns
Brand impersonation uses an organization's name, logo and visual identity to make an attack credible. The victims are usually the brand's customers or its own employees, and the organization being impersonated often learns about it last — from a customer complaint rather than from any control it operates. The forms it takes Lookalike domains are the foundation of most of it. Typosquatting registers common misspellings. Character substitution swaps visually similar characters, and internationalized domain names allow characters from other scripts that render almost identically to Latin ones — a homograph attack that is genuinely hard to spot in an address bar. Combosquatting appends a plausible word, producing something like a support or login variant of the real name, which looks legitimate precisely because organizations do register domains like that. Alternative top-level domains take the exact brand name under a different suffix. Cloned websites follow: the real si...