How to Monitor for Phishing Attacks Targeting Your Customers

Phishing attacks don’t just harm your customers. They can cost your business millions of dollars in remediation, downtime, regulatory impacts, and lost customers. What’s more, phishing attacks can have a lasting negative impact on your company’s reputation.

It’s not enough to just tell customers to be careful anymore or educate them about telltale signs of a potentially fraudulent email.

Customers expect the organizations they choose to do business with to protect them from harm. Experian’s 2025 U.S. Identity and Fraud report found that more than 80% of consumers expect companies to act on security or privacy concerns, and half want stronger online safeguards.

And, AI-driven fraud has made it much harder to spot phishing attacks. Phishing attempts are no longer obvious as AI makes poorly written emails and bad brand impersonations a thing of the past.

Businesses need a Digital Risk Protection strategy that enables them to proactively monitor and mitigate threats, protect customers, and preserve trust. In this post, we’ll outline how phishing has evolved, why traditional anti-phishing monitoring methods fall short, and how a digital risk protection solution can help you outpace threats.

Machine-Speed Deception: The Reality of Modern Brand Impersonation

We’ve all gotten recommendations from companies warning us to watch for typos, beware urgent offers that sound too good to be true, and check links before clicking on them. But, the reality is that artificial intelligence has changed the game. As we’ve shared before, AI-generated phishing attacks are now nearly impossible to differentiate from authentic messages.

Today, AI has made phishing emails, smishing, and brand impersonations nearly perfect. No more typos or broken English. No more grainy logos or obvious signs that a profile is a bot.

Not only is it harder to spot AI-driven fraud, agentic AI tools also allow bad actors to automatically create and deploy convincing phishing attacks quickly at scale.

And, these agentic AI-generated attacks are working. Microsoft’s annual Digital Defense report says people who receive an AI phishing email are 4.5 times more likely to click on the malicious link or file. In addition, these AI-automated emails achieved 54% click-through rate in 2024 compared to just 12% for non-AI phishing emails.

Every successful phishing attack against a customer is a direct hit to your brand’s reputation. Can your company afford to pay that trust tax on your brand’s equity? If your customer was targeted right now, how many minutes until you even know about it?

Why Traditional Monitoring Is Failing

Traditional phishing and brand scam monitoring approaches rely too much on backward-looking views that do too little, too late to protect your customers. Why? Here’s a few ways that traditional anti-phishing monitoring fails in today’s automated, AI-driven fraud landscape:

Legacy approaches miss modern threats. Legacy models are typically reactive by design. Often, phishing is detected when something bad happens — a weird email is reported, an employee clicks something they shouldn’t, or stolen credentials get reported. Or, legacy tools rely heavily on manual searches and basic Google Alerts to uncover threats. But by the time those phishing attacks show up in searches, it’s too late.

Focusing on internal networks creates a big visibility gap. Most security teams only see their own network. They are blind to the "outside-in" attacks happening on spoofed domains or social platforms like Facebook or Telegram.

Legacy models focus on historical data, not spotting patterns. New phishing domains and messages can be spun up and deployed in real time. This means relying on blacklists and known bad IP addresses is no longer enough. By the time a new IP address is blocked, the attacker has already moved on to another one.

Manual methods are too slow. Human-led takedowns can take days or even weeks to complete. But, an AI-powered phishing site can do its damage and vanish in less than 4 hours.

Instead of relying on these slower, heavily manual methods, digital risk protection solutions can help companies fight fire with fire — using agentic AI phishing defenses against agentic AI attacks.

Active Defense at Scale: How DRP Solutions Outpace Automated Attacks

The best way to combat agentic AI threats is AI-powered detection and takedown. The best DRP solutions enable you to build that command center we mentioned earlier to proactively manage risk, monitor threats to your brand, and rapidly disrupt threats. Instead of a reactive workflow, here’s how you can build a proactive defense with DRP:

Continuous Digital Footprint Mapping

Instead of reactive alerts and manual monitoring, you need a solution that can provide a unified view of your digital footprint and uses continuous attack surface monitoring to detect threats. For instance, Netcraft’s DRP platform creates a "baseline" of your brand and monitors the entire internet (including the Dark Web) for attacks like phishing and brand impersonation. We also use advanced pattern recognition to capture threats, whether they are active, dormant, or using complex redirection chains.

AI-to-AI Neutralization

If you’re trying to fight AI agents with human analysts, you are fighting with the wrong tools. Instead, AI-enhanced DRP solutions are built to fight against machine attackers. Agentic AI threats are fast, adaptive, and autonomous. They need an equally fast, adaptive, autonomous tool to combat them.

Real-Time Domain Registration Monitoring

Real-time domain registration monitoring automates the ongoing tracking of newly registered domains to detect unauthorized and fraudulent threats. This approach helps you catch "look-alike" domains at the point they are registered, often before the fraudulent site even goes live

Autonomous Takedowns

A DRP solution doesn't just alert you when a threat is detected. It takes things a step further by automatically initiating takedowns via API integrations with infrastructure providers. This moves your takedown speed for fraudulent sites from days or even weeks to being able to block a site in minutes or seconds while leveraging autonomous triage and containment to completely remove a malicious site in just a few hours.

DMARC Management

DRP provides the easiest way for companies to monitor complex email authentication that stops brand spoofing at the source. Netcraft’s DRP solution enables you to implement DMARC visualizations and detection to quickly identify unauthorized email activity and stop attackers from spoofing your domain.

Intelligence Feeds

DRP solutions can also feed ongoing threat intelligence directly into your company’s existing cybersecurity technologies (i.e., SIEM/SOAR) so that your security team can protect against emerging threats as soon as they are discovered.

Your Brand, Secured by Netcraft

In 2026, you can either react to a phishing attack or data breach after the damage is done. Or, you can detect and neutralize the threat before your customer ever sees it. The time is now to invest in a Digital Risk Protection strategy instead of waiting for an attack to cost you and your customers

Don't let an AI bot destroy your brand's reputation. Schedule a demo to see how Netcraft’s DRP solution monitors and stops phishing attacks before any damage is done.