What is an impersonation attack?

An impersonation attack is when a digital adversary fraudulently poses as a trusted associate of the target – often as a friend, work colleague, or an executive leader at the target’s company – in hopes of convincing the target to divulge sensitive information or to execute a fraudulent financial transaction. Impersonation attacks can be executed over virtually any communication medium, including social media, email, telephone, voicemail, and even SMS text messaging. Impersonation attacks also include brand impersonation scams that leverage fraudulent digital infrastructure (like spoofed domains, fake social media accounts, or fake mobile apps) to mislead targets.

What are some examples of an impersonation attack?

An impersonation attack may look like: A fraudulent Facebook page directing users to a spoofed website where they will phish for sensitive information, such as login credentials. A website that appears legitimate but is selling counterfeit products using your branding and images. A false job listing on LinkedIn connected to a fraudulent company recruiter page, which causes prospective employees to avoid applying to your legitimate listing as they lose their PII to scammers.

How can you prevent an impersonation attack?

There are multiple ways to prevent an impersonation attack. Training employees (and when appropriate, customers) to recognize phishing tactics through regular phishing tests can prevent them from falling victim to an impersonation attack. It’s also important to monitor the web through a fake account detection platform for mentions of your brand and digital assets. Further, you should keep your customers and employees informed of any potential impersonation accounts or attempts that are found.

How are fake accounts created?

Malicious hackers can create fake accounts using your branded digital assets or your executives’ personal photos and information. Threat actors looking to gain access to your audience will copy your images, videos, and even your website to create spoofed versions of your online business. These might take the form of social media pages, websites, or email domains that appear legitimate. Because the pages are made using your digital assets, customers and employees may have trouble distinguishing between the real page and the fake one, creating the opportunity for them to inadvertently interact with the fraudulent page, which then makes the page appear more credible.

How can fake account creation be prevented?

To prevent future attacks, fake account detection is necessary. Additionally, working with an impersonation solution can help you remove the offending or fake accounts or content through a takedown process. ZeroFox provides enterprises protection, intelligence, and disruption to detect and prevent impersonation attacks from across the public attack surface.

Impersonation and Fake Account Detection

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Opportunistic cybercriminals see the brand you’ve worked hard to build, and they want to profit from it, too. Fake social media profiles, email impersonations, and spoofed domains are used to launch phishing campaigns, scam customer, distribute counterfeit and pirated content, traffic in stolen intellectual property, and perpetrate social engineering attacks. In short, they put your good name to work for their criminal activity.

How does an impersonation attack work?

An impersonation attack targets businesses and high profile individuals and creates a fraudulent account using that company’s or individual’s digital assets. Then, using the fake accounts, bad actors gain access to, and the trust of, your connections, exploiting them for financial gain or personal data.. When the target interacts with malicious infrastructure, their data may be stolen or spyware may be installed and used to steal their access credentials for secure systems.

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We find the fakes so you don’t have to.

Malicious hackers create fake accounts using your branded digital assets, making it difficult for customers and employees to distinguish between the real and fake pages. Manually finding these fakes takes hours. We can find them in minutes and get them taken down for you.

Brand attacks and impersonations are growing

The percentage of year-over-year increase in security incidents relating to impersonation scams

Increase in HR scams, such as impersonating a company’s HR department to steal information

Year-over-year increase in impersonating profiles

Why ZeroFox for account takeover protection? We pull off the mask on impersonators.

AUTOMATED FAKE ACCOUNT DETECTION ACROSS SOCIAL, EMAIL, AND WEB
Identify fraudulent profiles on social media platforms, impersonating email accounts, and spoofed domains in real-time.

DISMANTLE AND TAKEDOWN FRAUD AND ATTACK INFRASTRUCTURE
Take down fake social profiles, dismantle email infrastructure, and shut down spoofed domains with the industry-leading automated takedown capability.

STOP FRAUD AND SCAMS IN THEIR TRACKS
Keep your customers safe when they engage with your brand by eliminating digital fraud across the web – in their inbox, social media accounts, and mobile app stores.

Don’t wait for followers to find impersonators. Explore our impersonation detection solutions.

BRAND PROTECTION
Protect your organization, reputation, and revenue against targeted attacks including phishing, impersonations, fraud, and piracy.

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DOMAIN PROTECTION
Protect owned websites through identification and remediation of impersonating domains, trademark infringement, and spoofing.

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EXECUTIVE PROTECTION
Protect key personnel against spear phishing attacks, impersonations, account hacking, violence, threats, and more.

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3 Impersonation Attack Examples You Should Know (And How to Prevent Them)

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Impersonation and Fake Account Detection

Find and stop fake accounts, emails, and domains

How does an impersonation attack work?

We find the fakes so you don’t have to.

Brand attacks and impersonations are growing

Why ZeroFox for account takeover protection? We pull off the mask on impersonators.

Why ZeroFox for account takeover protection? We pull off the mask on impersonators.

Don’t wait for followers to find impersonators. Explore our impersonation detection solutions.

Don’t wait for followers to find impersonators. Explore our impersonation detection solutions.

See ZeroFox in action

Frequently asked questions

Resources

External Cybersecurity is your first line of defense

3 Impersonation Attack Examples You Should Know (And How to Prevent Them)

Find the Fake