The Comprehensive Guide to Brand Protection: 7 Proven Ways to Protect Your Brand in 2026

Why You Should Protect Your Brand Today

The abuse of brands online is growing faster than ever before. The global authentication and brand protection market is expected to exceed $7.64B by 2032, demonstrating how relevant this issue has become for so many enterprises. Counterfeiting and piracy alone could cost the global economy $4.2T by 2025, eroding consumer trust and downstream losses across industries. For CISOs and security professionals, protecting brands has become a critical component of digital risk management, and cannot remain an optional legal matter.

Brand protection is best thought of as a coordinated set of legal, technical, and operational responses to prevent unlicensed use of brand assets (names, logos, domains, and content), and remove abuse to continue to protect customers, revenue, and reputation. In the following chapters, we identify seven strategies for 2025 that security teams will implement to protect their organization's digital footprint across websites, social media, search engines, and online marketplaces.

What Brand Protection Means Online

The threat landscape of brand abuse has expanded beyond trademark infringement. Brand abuse includes phishing sites that collect credentials, fake landing pages that capture payments, counterfeit product listings that deliver unsafe products, and impersonation on social media that can mislead customers. The advent of AI generated content has lowered the barrier of entry for bad actors to scale these threats, so detection and remediation requires action as soon as possible through early detection and automation. For security leaders, the values are obvious; protecting clients from fraud not only avoids chargebacks and reputational impact, but in the world of e-commerce, it also impacts search rankings, and regulatory risk. Online brand protection is essentially about protecting trust, a strategic asset that is as valuable as revenue.

The Full Spectrum: Websites, Social, Search, and Marketplaces

Brand abuse manifests in a variety of ways across a number of digital channels. While the web still represents a primary source of phishing, lookalike domains, and cloned portals designed to harvest credentials, social media marketers may stumble upon fake accounts, scams, presentations for counterfeit giveaways, and malicious advertisement placement. Bad actors running malvertising campaigns might also hijack keywords and leverage affiliate fraud. Marketplaces and app stores provide opportunities for online criminals to flood users with counterfeit listings, unauthorized sellers, and spoofed apps. Ultimately, these tactics appeal to adversaries because they exploit human trust and behavior, requiring less technical knowledge.

To protect against abuses in these environments (and others), effective brand security must combine a high level of threat intelligence with speed and scalable action. There are signals that can help guide information such as: newly registered domains, suspect certificate issuers, identifying patterns based on hosting ASN, image reuse, ad copy fingerprints; and the security team must act to reduce potential harm to their customers.

Legal Enforcement vs. Technical Detection or Takedowns

Brand protection should be about a balance of legal and technical solutions. While legal enforcement through methods such as trademark filings, UDRP/URS domain disputes, marketplace and brand registries, and cease-and-desist letters should be taken against repeat infringement cases or disputes over domains, technical solutions using detection or takedowns are built to be fast and effective. Technical detection and takedowns take advantage of modernized automation capabilities, monitoring Certificate Transparency (CT) logs, and passive DNS correlation strategies to identify phishing websites and malicious infrastructure you can find in hours, not weeks.

A takedown is a formal notification requesting removal of malicious, or infringing content, generally supported by URLS, WHOIS data, HTTP headers and screenshots. Time sensitive scams (e.g. phishing, malware) require rapid takedowns while legal remedies are better for slow-moving disputes where precedent is useful.

Risks to Customers, Revenue, and Reputation

The costs of doing nothing are real. Consumers face fraud, identity theft, and physical risks from counterfeit products. Businesses face loss of sales, increased chargeback rates, increased customer support work, and lost search and genAI optimization. The scope is equally consequential: as noted above, global counterfeiting and piracy may approach $4.2T by 2025. And 73% of consumers report that they disengage from a brand after a counterfeit-related negative experience.

The view from this angle means that brand protection is more than limiting risks to your bottom line; it's also a growth enabler. Namely, strong brand protection means fewer losses to fraud means better customer retention means better compliance with regulations which matter more in regulated industries.

Seven Proven Approaches to Brand Protection

A modern brand protection program requires holistic defenses corresponding to attacker threat tactics:

Detect & takedown phishing and fake sites quickly

Phishing scams represent one of the most prolific risks, with stolen brand data to extract credentials or payments for fake goods. Security teams need to continuously monitor certificate transparency logs, passive DNS records, and mentions of brand terms to discover these malicious sites as early as possible. Because registrars, hosts, and CDNs take the actions to remove malicious sites, working with a partner with strong relationships with these internet infrastructure providers can expedite and even automate the takedown process. And speed is critical to address the risk phishing infrastructure presents because the longer a fake site remains live, the more customers may fall victim to its scams.

Figure 1. Netcraft detects threats early, with an average block time of 0.08 hours, sharply reducing exposure before peak malicious activity.

In terms of measuring your program's success, consider median time-to-detect (MTTD) and time-to-takedown (TTTD) as key metrics. Monitor domain and typosquatting attacks, including IDN homographs.

Lookalike domains, whether they're basic typosquatting tactics or customized IDN homographs encoded in Punycode are often one of the first steps taken toward an eventual phishing scheme. A watchlist of brand strings, homoglyph variants, and past uses of odd TLDs, compounded with risk scoring. When identifying high risk domains initiate defensive registrations or plan for early takedown, use risk scores developed from registrar reputation, MX records, and cert issuance.

Enforce email authentication with DMARC, SPF, DKIM, and BIMI

Email spoofing is still among the top vectors for fraud. The first line of defense is to deploy SPF and DKIM for authentication to the sender. Implement DMARC without immediate enforcement to collect reports on domain usage. Start with a monitoring policy (p=none) and move to a quarantine policy and then reject policy. Use DMARC report data to obtain threat intelligence. Finally implement BIMI for telling users you are verified in the inbox.

Monitor certificates and attack surface using CT logs and passive DNS

Using CT logs can help your teams do near real-time monitoring for certificates related to lookalike domains. By matching records meaningfully with passive DNS, teams can suffer less from having to fight to take down one instance of a camped domain. Coordinating efforts to address instances as a mix and/or cluster of threat infrastructures is ideal. The evidence packages should be thorough enough to get coordination for the registrar easily based on past use of the registrar and compliance policy for the domain (the CT entry, certificate chain, any hosting information). This reinforces the value of working with a brand protection partner that has longstanding relationships with internet providers. While registrars will review takedown requests, they act most quickly on reports provided from those with whom they have established trusted partnerships.

Protect social media, apps, and marketplaces from impersonation

Social impersonation and counterfeit ads and listings are a popular and effective vector that results in financial loss. Monitor all unauthorized usage of brand names, logos, or product images on every platform across the internet. Use image hashing to detect counterfeits at scale, while using marketplace brand registry application programming interfaces (API) to expedite removals. Scan app store metadata routinely for fake/malicious apps exploiting your customers.

Protect search ads and affiliates

Search malvertising and nefarious affiliates can divert traffic and lower your return on investment (ROI). Capture brand keyword ads, document redirect chains, and enforce affiliate compliance. Terminate abusive affiliates and work through ad networks to cancel criminal placements. Tracking these threats protects revenue and brand integrity.

Automate evidence gathering and global enforcement

Automation is critical to scalability in brand protection. When assembling cases, workflows should automatically store screenshots, DNS and CT artifacts, and chain-of-custody. Integrate the detections into SIEM/SOAR, ticketing and CRM software to gain better response time. Localize your takedown notices, while maintaining records of service level agreement (SLA) response time for global coverage.

Selecting the right brand protection services

When selecting the right services, you will find some trade-offs between coverage breadth, detection accuracy, takedown speed, evidence quality, and ROI. The best website brand protection services will have depth of internet telemetry, machine-driven detection, evidence packages, trusted relationships with internet infrastructure entities, and will enable fast, automated removal processes. While technological solutions drive effective brand protection, human oversight and insights help ensure that enforcement actions are proportionate, evidence is defensible, and legitimate resellers or fair use are not inadvertently disrupted, striking the right balance between aggressive threat mitigation and maintaining customer trust.

Netcraft offers global phishing detection, certificate and domain intelligence, and the fastest takedowns in the brand protection space. The impact on security teams is significant because its evidence-based approach integrates into SOC/SIEM pipelines, providing measurable reduction to infringers using their brands.

Comparing the Leading Vendors

DRP vendors differ significantly in coverage and response. Red Points is a brand protection vendor but relies more on manual oversight, and doesn’t have strong infrastructure relationships or customizable reporting. Recorded Future delivers threat intelligence feeds but outsources its coordination of takedown capabilities. PhishLabs is strong in phishing response but narrower outside of email-borne threats. ZeroFox offers broad monitoring and managed takedowns but can be slower due to limited automation and detection accuracy. Netcraft combines internet-scale telemetry, longstanding provider relationships, and automated workflows to deliver fast, reliable takedowns that shorten attacker dwell time – all while providing customers with visibility and transparency throughout the process.

Implementation Phases and Success Measurement

An effective brand protection initiative can develop in a structured manner as a 30-60-90-day plan, but it also offers an opportunity to critically assess partners for coverage, speed, and integration.

The First 30 Days: Conduct a complete brand asset inventory (e.g. confirmed domains, monitor DMARC, configure Certificate Transparency log alerts), start to evaluate vendors that you will assess (i.e., coverage breadth, detection technology, ease of integration with current security stack).

The Next 30 Days: Layer on meanings and context through passive DNS with correlation, conduct social sweeps, try API based takedown services to see who gets you the fastest results and best accuracy.

The Final 30 Days: Finalize DMARC reject with IT, localize your notice-and-takedown process, commence legal action against the biggest offenders. Use the performance data from your services - e.g. detection rate, median takedown time - to finalize your partner choice and embrace a partner that can grow with your needs.

To measure success, identify key performance indicators (KPIs) such as mean time to detection (MTTD), time to takedown (TTTD), takedown success ratio, fraud lost prevented, and reduced customer complaints. Reporting your findings in executive dashboards will help demonstrate ROI and foster additional investment.

Final Considerations

Resisting the urge to treat brand protection as a one-time project can be difficult. Brand protection is a continuous, data-led practice that both protects customers and sustains revenue & trust. In 2025 and beyond, organizations embracing a layered, automated, and evidence-based brand protection approach will do more than defend against threats; they will also create safer & more resilient digital experiences for their customers.