Solving Digital Brand Risks: The Definitive Financial Sector Playbook

The financial services sector is the most targeted industry by cybercriminals and cyber threats continue to grow.

In 2024 alone, banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions saw a 25%  increase in cyberattacks compared with 2023, with no indication of slowing in 2025. This growth is also fuelled by the evolution in cybercriminal tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) means attacks becoming more complex and harder to defend against.

Brand impersonation, phishing, social engineering and AI deepfakes are just some of the cybersecurity challenges that the financial sector faces.

A swift response to these threats is vital and banks must be prepared to act quickly to identify and takedown scam websites impersonating their brands. This isn’t just for the safety of their customers, but also to protect the company’s reputation too.

Brand protection is therefore vital for banks. At Netcraft, we have 20+ years of experience aiding top companies with takedowns and online brand safety.  Our AI-powered solutions and human expertise help banks with financial brand protection, at scale and with rapid remediation.

This expertise helps banks reduce risk, improve customer trust and avoid loss via fraud.

In this post, we will dive into…

• The Financial Brand Risk Landscape

• Cybersecurity Capabilities That Matter for Banks and Fintechs

• Playbooks to Detect and Disrupt Impersonation

• How to Evaluate the Best Brand Protection Services for Websites

• Measurement and ROI for Financial Brand Protection

The Financial Brand Risk Landscape

Cyberattacks are costly, especially in financial services: only data breaches in healthcare cost more on average.

According to IBM’s Cost of Data Breach Report 2025, the average cost of a data breach for financial companies following an incident is $5.56 million. This includes lost revenue from system downtime, reputational damage and lost customers. In addition, the cost of cyberattacks falls to the consumer as well, with losses in 2024 totally $X according the IC3 research data.

For financial services in particular, reputation and security posture are inseparable because customers won’t bank with an institution they believe to be insecure.

But keeping people and networks secure against cyberthreats is becoming more challenging as attack techniques evolve. AI deepfakes, fake apps and coordinated social engineering campaigns are all routine attack vectors which banks now face. 

The aftermath of attacks not only creates problems for employees and customers, but if they’re handled incorrectly, the reputation of the business can be negatively impacted. Perhaps permanently.

From Phishing to Deepfakes and Fake Apps

Phishing attacks are becoming ever more sophisticated. In the past, you could tell people to watch out for telltale signs of malicious emails, like spelling errors, poor formatting or unexpected attachments. 

But now in the era of professional cybercrime – aided by rapid developments in AI – it’s easier than ever for fraudsters to develop and distribute targeted, legitimate looking campaigns across multiple channels.

Lookalike domains, spoofed SMS IDs, deepfake calls, phoney social media support accounts and fraudulent apps are now all tools of the cybercriminal arsenal in attacks against banks and bank customers.

The Darcula-suite phishing ecosystem has evolved into a fully featured, phishing-as-a-service toolkit that now includes generative-AI assistance enabling novice operators to clone legitimate brand sites, auto-generate localized phishing forms, and deploy convincing, brand-specific scams in minutes. Netcraft’s analysis shows darcula-suite v3 and its recent AI enhancements dramatically lower the technical bar for attackers, increase campaign speed and scale, and produce highly customized pages that frustrate signature-based detection. In response, Netcraft has already disrupted large parts of Darcula’s infrastructure, taking down thousands of fraudulent sites, blocking related IPs, and flagging widespread phishing domains as part of our brand protection efforts

Indeed, AI is fast becoming a primary tool for cyberattackers. Across Asia-Pacific, there was a 1,530% increase in deepfake attacks between 2023 and 2024 alone.

Why the Financial Sector Is Targeted 

As established, the financial sector is a major target for cybercriminals for several reasons:

• High-value: Compromised networks and accounts drive immediate profit.

• Credential reuse: Banking credentials unlock opportunities for broader identity theft.

• Abundant surface area: The multiple brands, apps, and channels used by banks mean more accounts and services to impersonate. 

Not only this, but the financial sector is built on trusted relationships, meaning that if a trusted party can be convincingly spoofed, it can be lucrative for cybercriminals. In addition to this, regulation in the financial sector means that reaction times to incidents can be slow – and by the time it’s been discovered the attackers have long made off with their bounty.

The unique circumstances, combined with the unique threats it faces, means that financial service providers need specialized, finance-aware protection. 

Impact on Call Centers and Customer Trust

The rise in impersonation attacks using deepfake video and audio isn’t just a problem for victims of account takeover, it creates problems for other customers and the bank too.

More convincing threats means more calls made to the bank service desk, increasing wait times for legitimate callers. Not only does this increase operational costs, it also leads to:

• Call center spikes and delays: Agents triage fraud exposure and reset credentials at scale.

• Chargebacks and dispute volume: Fraud losses drive processing costs and customer friction.

• Trust erosion: Public scams create fear around official communications, reducing digital engagement.

“Fraud prevention is no longer just about reducing losses, it’s now a business differentiator. Banks that deliver strong fraud defences while maintaining a smooth digital experience will win customer trust and loyalty.” - James Roche, principal fraud consultant, FICO EMEA, October 2025.

Capabilities That Matter for Banks and Fintechs 

The growing number and complexity of multi-channel threats targeting financial providers means they need appropriate defensive capabilities.  Cross-channel visibility, AI-enhanced detection, and automated takedowns can all help keep banks and their customers safe.

Cross-Channel Monitoring Across Web, Social, SMS, and App Stores 

Continuous monitoring is therefore vital, not only to prevent cyberattacks and account takeovers, but also to ensure customer trust is protected. Netcraft offers this cross-channel monitoring. Our platform monitors web, social, SMS, and app ecosystems in real time and prioritizes enforcement. Including:

• Web: Spoofed domains, subdomain abuse, phishing kits, and TLS abuse

• Social: fake support accounts, executive impersonation, social ads, and giveaway scams.

• SMS: Smishing (SMS phishing) via shortened links and spoofed SMS Sender IDs

• App stores: Fraudulent banking apps and developer impersonation across Apple, Google, and third-party stores. 

AI Detection with Human Verification and False Positive Control

Cybercriminals have been quick to exploit AI for making cyberattacks more effective. But ultimately, AI is a tool, which in the right hands, can be used for good, to help protect banks and their customers from fraud. 

AI-driven detection and classification of threats can help security teams rapidly identify and takedown logo misuse, lookalike strings, content fingerprints and other techniques used by attackers when building false sites. 

Paired with human expertise and verification to minimize false positives, all of this can help banks remain secure and assure quality controls around their branding. This includes the deployment of: 

• Confidence thresholds: Escalate anomalous results to analysts for human-in-the-loop validation

• Feedback loops: Retrain models with takedown outcomes and analyst annotations.

• Bank-safe workflows: Suppress benign affiliates and authorized resellers with allow lists.

Automated Takedowns and Compliance-Ready Reporting

In the context of online branding protection, a takedown is the process of removing or disabling malicious content by coordinating with hosting providers, platforms, or mobile carriers. 

These actions are not taken lightly and require strong compliance, plus evidence that platforms are being used maliciously – a false positive against a legitimate website could be costly and embarrassing for all parties. Compliance requirements include:

• Evidence packs: Time-stamped captures, headers, DNS records, chain-of-custody details.

• Audit trails: Case history, contacts, and outcomes—exportable for internal audit and regulators

You can minimize the impact of cyberattacks with Netcraft’s automated threat detection and domain takedown platform that blocks and removes malicious content fast.

“Before [Netcraft], it could take up to an hour to start with that process [takedown]. Now, practically in 1 minute it is already reported and Netcraft is already in communication with the hosting provider.” - Digital Fraud Center Manager in Financial Services.

Playbook to Detect and Disrupt Impersonation

As such a common target for fraudsters and online attackers, banks and financial service providers should have an incident response playbook in place, allowing them to take direct actions to detect and disrupt impersonation attacks at any time. Here are some of the actions which should be in that playbook.

Monitor Spoofed Domains and Smishing at Telecom and Registrar Layers

Direct actions which can be taken include:

• Pre-emptive domain monitoring: Detect lookalikes (IDN homographs, typos, subdomain abuse), correlate with hosting and SSL telemetry.

• Registrar and DNS workflows: Submit abuse notices with evidence to the registrar (the company that registers domain names and manages ownership records) and escalate the request through established channels.

• Telecom integrations: Share Indicators of Compromise (IOC) feeds for SMS blocking; disrupt smishing via carrier partnerships and SMS firewalls.

Remove Fake Apps and Social Accounts with Rapid Enforcement

Fake apps and social accounts remain a popular method of attack for fraudsters which they can easily use to dupe people into mistakenly handing over their account details. Taking swift action to detect and disrupt these fakes should therefore form a key step in a playbook to counter impersonation. These include: 

• App store enforcement: Monitor app listings, developer IDs, and certificates; file IP and fraud violations with evidence.

• Social platform workflows: Triage impersonation accounts, prioritize verified handles, and automate submission with case bundles.

Coordinate Security, Fraud, Legal, and Comms During Active Attacks 

Takedowns are effective, but even what seem to be simple takedowns can be complex to orchestrate, especially when multiple different parties are involved. To aid efficiency, organizations should prepare a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) coordination plan to clarify roles across the entire process. For example: 

• Security/Fraud: Detection, takedown, IOC distribution.

• Legal: IP assertions, regulator notifications, evidence preservation.

• Comms/PR: Customer advisories, website banners, social replies.

• Customer operations: Call center scripts, knowledge base updates, secure recovery paths. 

A synchronized takedown operation helps to reduce risks and losses for customers, as well as reduce call volumes and the risk of reputational damage to the company itself.

How to Evaluate the Best Brand Protection Services for Websites

In this buyer’s guide, we’ll help you through the process of choosing the best brand protection services for websites which meet the specific needs of the financial services industry. These include telecom reach, app store coverage and regulator-ready reporting features.

Top Companies for Online Brand Safety: Finance-Weighted Selection Shortlist

When evaluating brand protection partners, especially in high-risk sectors like finance, four qualities consistently separate the best from the rest: visibility, speed, accuracy, and scale. These determine how effectively a provider can detect, disrupt, and prevent online threats before they damage your brand or customers.

Netcraft is widely recognized as one of the most trusted brand protection providers in the industry. Our platform combines unmatched internet-scale visibility with AI-powered detection and rapid takedown capabilities, delivering enterprise-grade protection at global scale. Built for financial services and other regulated sectors, Netcraft enables organizations to defend against phishing, fraud, and impersonation threats with exceptional precision and speed.

To see how Netcraft compares to other leading platforms, explore our latest roundup: The 6 Best Brand Protection Platforms for Defending Your Company’s Online Reputation

Best Brand Monitoring Tools for Web Services: Must-Have Integrations

Threat intelligence, takedown and brand protection tools make a great arsenal of services for financial institutions to help protect both their customers and their own brand from account takeover attacks. But while these tools are helpful, for best results, they should be integrated with other services. Some that we recommend include: 

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools to aggregate and analyzesecurity logs, as well as centralize alerts that correlate with fraud/SOC events. Examples of SIEM providers include Splunk, Rapid7 and LogRhythm.

• Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools to coordinate playbooks across different tools, plus automate enrichment and response workflows. Examples of SOAR providers include Cortex, Swimlane and Microsoft Sentinel.

• Ticketing tools to help management of takedown tasks, service-level agreements and audit trails. Examples of ticketing tools include ServiceNow, Jira, and Zendesk.

• Registrar/DNS and hosting providers:  to help accelerate domain and hosting enforcement.

• Netcraft's robust API integrations: enable analysts to drop and report threats for takedown within their current systems. With a variety of endpoints available, teams can integrate their automated tools into the Netcraft Takedown service as well as view information about their attacks at a glance.

Measurement and ROI for Financial Brand Protection

Financial brand protection is vital for banks, their employees, and their customers. But like many services which modern businesses pay for, executives and management require evidence that initiatives are working, supported by clear KPIs. That means these initiatives must be able to prove they result in reduced losses, lower call volumes, and faster incident resolution. These Essential KPIs include:

• Detection-to-takedown time: Median removal times across web, social, SMS, and apps by attack channel.

• Attack availability or dwell time: Duration malicious content remains accessible to customers.

• False positive rate: Percentage of benign items incorrectly flagged.

• Coverage: Share of priority channels and geographies actively monitored.

• Call center deflection: Reduction in calls after public advisories and takedowns.

• Customer impact: Click-through rates to malicious content and resulting fraud attempts.

In addition to this, it’s important to note how faster enforcement decreases conversion rates on active scams, ensuring that cybercriminals have less time to illicitly access funds, while keeping trust of customers intact.

Critical to this are Evidence Packs and Regulator-Ready Audit Trails. These help to accelerate takedowns with infrastructure providers as well as providing intelligence on real-life scammer activity – which could also be useful to law enforcement services. Contents for audit-ready documentation includes: 

• Screenshots, headers, DNS/WHOIS, SSL details, time stamps, and chain of custody.

• Abuse tickets, platform IDs, escalation threads, legal notices, and outcomes.

• Export formats aligned to internal audit, regulators, and law enforcement agencies.

With industry-leading takedown speeds, near-zero false positive rates and unmatched visibility into attack infrastructure, Netcraft’s brand protection platform is trusted by top banks to see more threats and stop them faster. Book your demo today.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Quickly Should a Provider Take Down Phishing Sites, Fake Apps, and Smishing Domains?

Leading providers target phishing site and smishing domain disruption in minutes to a few hours, with fake app removals can be completed in under 48 hours – and sometimes under 24 hours – depending on policies and escalation paths.

What Telecom and Registrar Integrations Are Critical to Stop Smishing at Scale?

Direct carrier and SMS firewall integrations, plus registrar, DNS, and hosting relationships, enable upstream blocking of Sender IDs and rapid domain or hosting suspensions across regions.

How Do Providers Detect and Mitigate Deepfakes and Executive Impersonation?

Platforms combine logo and likeness recognition, voice/video anomaly detection, and cross-channel monitoring with rapid takedowns of misuse on social, web, and app ecosystems.

What Does Implementation Look Like for Banks and How Long Until Value?

Typical onboarding configures brand assets, channels, and integrations within weeks, with early value realized as detections trigger the first waves of rapid enforcement.

How Do Solutions Integrate with Fraud, SOC, and SIEM/SOAR Workflows?

Modern platforms deliver APIs, webhooks, and turnkey SIEM/SOAR connectors so alerts, evidence, and takedown status flow into existing case and response playbooks.

What Evidence and Reporting Satisfy Regulators and Internal Audit?

Regulator-ready reports include time-stamped captures, DNS/WHOIS, headers, chain of custody, abuse submissions, and outcomes, exportable for audit and supervisory reviews.