From Spoofed Domains to Fake Ads: How Phishing Attacks Erode Brand Trust

With over a million phishing attacks recorded in the first quarter, it’s small wonder that brand phishing remains at the top of the list of global cyber threats in 2025. The rise of AI capability; the increased availability of Phishing-As-A-Service kit; and the move towards quishing and smishing (using QR codes or sending malicious links directly to victim’s mobile devices) means that traditional defences are being increasingly bypassed, making the digital space even more risky for consumers and businesses alike.

The Shifting Face of Phishing

Phishing is especially bad news when it comes to protecting your brand’s reputation. The increase in prevalence, as well as the increase in quality of phishing, deepfakes and other means of brand identity theft, means that we are all at greater risk of being fooled. As attackers exploit tools such as spoofed domains and are even capable of faking social media ads, your brand is at direct risk of being misused to deceive customers.

The danger to your brand here is immense. If you’re the victim of an attack, your brand equity will be directly affected, with trust in your brand and its reputation being damaged to the extent that potential and existing customers will no longer want to engage with you for fear of being tricked once more. Your legitimate campaigns and communications are more likely to be mistrusted, wasting investments in marketing and making efforts to regain trust harder.

Spoofed Domains and Lookalike Websites

There are many ways in which bad actors out to misuse your brand to their own ends, including deceptive domains that make use of typosquatting, homoglyphs and subdomains. Typosquatting involves registering common misspellings, variations, or typoed versions of your brand name in order to capture traffic that would otherwise be directed to your site. Think braand.com, or brand-com.com. YouTube users who mistyped the URL as yuube.com, for example, were redirected to a malicious site that asked users to “add a malware ‘security check extension“.

Homoglyphs operate in a similar way, making use of characters such as visually similar but nonetheless different Cyrillic letters in place of Latin letters. Subdomains, too, exploit the human propensity to overlook subtle differences, adding in periods to create lookalike websites under different domains.

Consumer confidence in your brand is directly damaged when your site is spoofed – clients in a hurry can be directed to dodgy webpages when looking for you, making them less likely to seek you out via the internet in future.

Fake Ads and Social Media Phishing

Another form of phishing is where attackers use paid media search ads and promoted social media posts to capitalise on your brand’s popularity for their own nefarious ends. These fraudulent ads can take the form of false ‘support accounts’, or even faked offers that catch and divert your potential customers to malicious pages that steal their details or even con them outright.

This, again, can have a catastrophic effect on customer perception of your brand, effecting the return on your marketing investment. If your existing and potential clients cannot trust your advertising, social media or otherwise, then your paid for media efforts will be wasted.

Email Impersonation and Business Email Compromise

Email Impersonation and Business Email Compromise (BEC) continues to be a common phishing threat in 2025, with 64% of organisations reporting BEC-style incidents in 2024. BEC attacks typically involve malicious actors pretending to be high level executives or even suppliers, fooling people in your business into sending funds to the wrong bank accounts.

In order to work effectively, BEC must exploit trust in your brand’s communications. Whether  that trust is in your CFO, who apparently needs you to urgently transfer funds to an offshore account, no questions asked, or if one of your trusted vendors lets you know that their banking details have changed, this form of phishing relies on existing trust in the status quo in order to bypass scepticism.

Take, for example, the exploitation of the Google Classroom brand in early 2025. Trust in this collaboration tool, which is used extensively by businesses and educational institutions, was taken advantage of when phishing invitations were distributed using their brand recognition. The malicious emails managed to bypass traditional email filters because they came from legitimate Google domains.

Google, one of the most recognisable (and one would assume protected) brands has been affected by phishing. No one is immune.

Customer Trust as Collateral Damage

The primary goal of most phishing attacks is to commit financial fraud. In the process, however, your most valuable asset – trust in your brand – is damaged, costing you hugely not just in the moment and in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but also in the longer term. Reduced brand engagement, and the hit to your brand’s reputation, means that the ROI on your marketing strategy is directly affected, and the loss in income from the subsequent fall in sales conversions sharpens the sting even further.

Furthermore, if the phishing attack results in a data breach, you are at risk of litigation from customers and suppliers whose information is now available to malicious actors.

Customer trust takes a long while to create, build and nurture. A phishing attack can obliterate this hard won and much cultivated trust instantaneously. Protecting trust in your brand is therefore imperative, and a penny of prevention is worth far, far more than a pound of cure in the case of cybersecurity.

How Brands Can Respond

So, what can you do to prevent reputation damage and trust erosion in your brand?

Continuous monitoring of your domains and social media pages so that you can immediately respond to any threats to your brand is an absolute must. It is, however, not enough to just monitor your brand pages: make sure that you expand your monitoring to watch out for brand lookalikes and spoofs, scan social media for potential fake ads, and track quishing attempts religiously.

Train and equip your staff on how to recognise cyberattacks like quishing, smishing, and deepfake impersonations. Decide in advance what you and your team will do in the event of an attack, and ensure that your cybersecurity protocols are up to date and effective.

If you are managing a vast array of domains, engaging a strong domain portfolio manager like BrandShelter could be your best option. BrandShelter offers proactive monitoring and centralised domain management, ensuring that none of your assets are overlooked. With a proven track record of comprehensive brand protection and advanced solutions, we can help you to mitigate the risk of brand abuse and strengthen the protection of your brand.

Phishing is not just an attack on your IT systems, it’s an attack on your brand and on your customers’ trust in your brand. By working with a trusted domain manager like BrandShelter, and by being on top of phishing and other threats, you can prepare yourself against cyberattacks that would otherwise erode brand trust and put your enterprise at risk.

Download our free Phishing Threat Report 2025 for more information on what to look out for, or speak to BrandShelter today. Our team is ready to assist you and will get back to you as soon as possible.

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