The Ultimate Guide to Domain Takedown Services in 2026
Phishing attacks have consistently been one of the most popular threat vectors deployed by adversaries and show no signs of slowing down. In fact, APWG observed 1,003,924 phishing attacks in just Q1 2025 alone. And, the Cybercrime Information Center reported more than 1.3 million phishing attacks between May and July 2025, roughly doubling the attacks seen earlier in the year. These stats are just a few indicators that overall phishing attacks remain high.
What’s more, advances in technology make it easier than ever to create and deploy a phishing attack. More and more phishing attacks are being delivered using Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) models. In fact, our platform found 13.5% of all phishing hostnames that we detected in June 2025 were powered by one of the Phishing-as-a-Service platforms that we track.
This makes the need for effective domain takedown services even more critical than ever. In this post, we will dive into:
What Domain Takedown Services Do and Why Speed Matters
Blocking vs Removal for Faster Risk Reduction
Common Attack Channels Across Domains, Social and SMS
Why Phishing-as-a-Service and Smishing Changed the Timeline
How Takedowns Work Across Domains, Hosting, and Platforms
Evidence Required to Prove Abuse and Accelerate Action
Who Can Remove Content and How to Engage Them
Legal Routes Including ToS, DMCA and UDRP
How to Choose the Best Phishing Takedown Service
What Domain Takedown Services Do and Why Speed Matters
Domain takedown services help companies to identify and remove phishing websites to protect their brand and customers. These services typically encompass rapid detection, evidence capture, coordinated outreach to hosts/registrars/platforms, and automated blocking to protect customers while removal of the malicious site is pending.
The most critical element with any domain takedown service is speed. Malicious domains often churn within hours. Using PhaaS (Phishing-as-a-Service) — a subscription marketplace where threat actors leverage ready-made phishing kits, hosting, and infrastructure to run large-scale scams without technical expertise, a single fraudster could create hundreds of fraudulent sites in a very short time. This demands identification and real-time interventions to protect your business and your customers.
“Many cybercriminals have layered contingency plans, often with additional domains already fired up and ready to take redirected traffic.”
— Why “One-and-Done” is Not Enough
Traditional, in-house methods of taking down websites are simply too slow and ineffective, allowing criminals to keep operating and causing damage to your brand and consumers. Automated takedown capabilities help you identify and disrupt cyber attacks, blocking phishing sites within minutes and removing malicious content within hours.
Here’s a few key operational metrics to consider when evaluating the best domain takedown services to protect your brand at speed:
Mean time to detect (MTTD): Time from threat emergence to detection.
Mean time to block (MTTB): Time to achieve effective user blocking via browser, network, or gateway controls. A good measurable goal for this is less than one hour for critical campaigns.
Median Takedown Time of First Outage: The median time from detection/confirmation of a malicious asset to the first point it becomes unavailable in any channel or geography. This can look fast even if the attack remains live elsewhere or reappears quickly. A good measurable goal for this is less than 24 hours for compliant hosts and registrars.
Median Takedown Time to Last Outage: The median time from detection to when the attack is unavailable everywhere – across all geos, channels, and rehosts – representing true end-to-end disruption. This is the more reliable measure of how long customers are actually exposed to the full attack lifecycle.Closure rate: Percentage of confirmed malicious assets successfully removed/suspended.
Attack dwell time: Duration the malicious asset remains reachable by victims.
Blocking vs Removal for Faster Risk Reduction
The best domain takedown services take a multi-pronged approach to protect the user immediately while working to remove malicious sites. That’s why Netcraft evaluates time to block and time to takedown – actioned concurrently – as core operational metrics above.
Blocking a phishing website helps you to immediately reduce your risk. It leverages Safe Browsing providers, email/web gateways, DNS sinkholing, and mobile security to mitigate exposure within minutes or hours. But, it’s not a universal solution as it doesn’t take down the infrastructure hosting the malicious site and users can still find a way to bypass these protections. While many brand protection solutions stop here, Netcraft focuses efforts to takedown criminal infrastructure, focusing on permanent removal.
Removing a phishing website disrupts the attacker's infrastructure and analytics, creating more durable impact and deterring further brand abuse. However, it can be a slower process as it relies on third-party cooperation as well as requires precise evidence to prove a site is malicious. More specifically, removal involves pursuing registrar suspension, host/ISP content removal, CDN purge, certificate revocation, and search de-indexing for durable disruption.
A dual method of blocking and removing phishing websites is ideal as it delivers immediate risk reduction while pursuing long-term brand protection by eliminating malicious sites.
Common Attack Channels Across Domains, Social, and SMS
Speed also matters in a world where modern phishing campaigns cover multiple channels and attack types to trick unsuspecting customers.
Today’s omnichannel phishing campaigns can include everything from website domains and subdomains, fake social media accounts, messenger apps, app stores, and SMS text messages (also known as smishing).
Take the massive growth in smishing as one example. Smishing is a form of phishing that uses SMS/text messages to coerce recipients into clicking malicious links, sharing credentials, or paying fake invoices. And, the volume of smishing attacks continues to rise. In 2023, more than 28% of all phishing attacks were delivered via SMS. And, smishing attacks rose 22% in a single quarter alone (Q3 2024).
Apple iMessage and other end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms introduce a similar blind spot. Because message content is encrypted between devices, carriers and security gateways cannot inspect links or payloads in real time, giving criminals a protected channel to deliver phishing links at scale. Once a consumer has landed on the cloned landing page, they end up sharing their credentials and allowing fraudsters to complete an account takeover.
Why Phishing-as-a-Service and Smishing Changed the Disruption Timeline
This rise in smishing and PhaaS toolkits has industrialized phishing at the highest scale. The ability to rotate through phishing kits more quickly, bypass security features like multi-factor authentication (MFA), and coordinate smishing campaigns has changed the game. Turnkey kits, support, and scalable phishing infrastructures are accelerating the setup and churn of new phishing websites, emails, and texts. Criminals no longer need technical skills to be able to build and launch an attack. And, the window from first lure to mass victimization is now measured in hours.
In early 2025 alone, more than 12.5 million malicious emails were detected. What’s more, 32% of phishing emails contained a high volume of text, pointing to a rise in the use of AI tools and LLMs (large language models) to build and deploy emails faster.
The need for real-time detection and rapid takedown is even more critical than ever.
How Takedowns Work Across Domains, Hosting, and Platforms
The process to take down fraudulent sites requires diligence, speed, and the right relationships to ensure sites are quickly identified and removed. This process includes:
Detection: Ongoing searches to detect potential malicious sites as early as possible, looking across a wide range of digital channels including typosquatting or lookalike domains, compromised websites, social media platforms, search engine ads, email abuse box monitoring, and SMS. This identification requires a takedown provider to access and process vast amounts of proprietary and OSINT data. Data curated to find and identify threats is a critical part of an evaluation process to determine the best takedown solution for your brand.
Verification: Once a suspected malicious site is identified, a domain alone may not confirm a brand impersonation or phishing attempt. Verification will involve looking at additional indicators of malicious content, including link following, credential stuffing, fuzzy matching, and OCR.
Evidence capture: When a malicious site is confirmed, organizations need to collect and share evidence with providers to initiate a takedown. (see below)
Blocking: As discussed earlier, takedowns are not instant so blocking the malicious site enables you to immediately protect customers and reduce risk. This is done by working with global browsers and email/SMS filters to block the site from showing up in search results (i.e., Google Safe Browsing, Bing, etc), email inboxes, and SMS messages. However, keep in mind that this type of fraudcasting to automatically deploy countermeasures to block threats in near real-time is not always equal depending on what service you use.
Notifications to contacts/platforms and escalations to registrars and domain hosts: Takedown services like Netcraft automatically contact hosting providers, domain registrars, webmasters, and others via email, API, private contact, or otherwise.
Removal confirmation: Finally, it’s important to confirm removal has been completed. As part of this, you may need to provide a 'resolved' status or retraction notice to third parties like Cloudflare or a specific email provider if they blocked your site during this process.
Ongoing monitoring: Lastly, it’s important to continually monitor for new iterations and resurrected phishing sites or abandoned digital assets under new domains or expired domains.
Evidence Required to Prove Abuse and Accelerate Action
To prove abuse and accelerate the takedown process, here’s a list of the basic evidence package that may be required:
Full indicators: URLs, domains/subdomains, WHOIS data, DNS records, etc.
Captured content: Timestamped screenshots, source HTML, phishing kit assets, and more.
Transaction traces: Redirection chains, form-post destinations, exfil endpoints, and credential-flow videos.
Messaging artifacts: Original SMS content and metadata, sender IDs, short-code/long-code details, and delivery timestamps.
As part of this documentation, best practices to follow include:
To capture geo-fenced or mobile-only pages, rotate mobile user agents, use residential proxies by region so that you can appear to be in that geo-fenced region, leverage headless browsers, and disable GPS on mobile devices for device-level captures.
Create a chronological, documented trail showing the collection, handling, and storage of evidence from discovery to disposition — ensuring integrity and admissibility.
Hash and timestamp all files to make sure that chronological trail is easy to follow.
Capture the identity of who collected the evidence and the system time it was collected to create a strong audit trail.
Make sure all files are stored in immutable storage so that they cannot be lost.
When collecting evidence, automation can be a powerful tool for scalable brand protection. Workflows should automatically store screenshots, DNS and CT artifacts, and chain-of-custody. You can also integrate the detections into SIEM/SOAR, ticketing, and CRM software to gain better response time.
Who Can Remove Content and How to Engage Them
Domain takedowns are a multi-layered process involving a broad ecosystem of infrastructure players including brand protection services, threat intelligence, registrars, hosting providers, certificate authorities, app stores, social networks, search engines, and even law enforcement. It’s important to leverage all these players to take down malicious content at speed. This includes:
Hosting provider/CDN (content delivery network): Request content removal for abuse/policy violations; include URLs, logs, and screenshots.
Registrar/registry: Request domain suspension for phishing/brand impersonation; include WHOIS, evidence, and brand rights.
Trusted contents platforms: Provide clear impersonation proof to social networks, app stores, and code repositories to request impersonation profiles, apps, and more are removed.
Certificate authority: Request certificate revocation when appropriate to degrade trust signals.
Search engines: Request urgent de-indexing to reduce victim acquisition.
Possible Legal Routes Including ToS, DMCA, and UDRP
You can also consider legal routes for domain takedowns when other methods fail. However, your best course of action is a trusted partner who can automatically contact relevant stakeholders across the infrastructure ecosystem and manage removals. Managing this process without trusted partner is often more time consuming, complex, and experience. That said, if ever needed, some of the best legal levers available to help brands take action include:
Terms of service (ToS) enforcement: This is often the fastest route for removing malicious content as it leverages the Terms of Service policies of registrars, domain hosts, and platforms to ensure they take action against phishing, malware, and impersonation.
DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) cases: This U.S. law can be an effective tool for the removal of cloned logos, text, and brand assets. It enables the swift removal of infringing content via DMCA Takedown Notices to online service providers.
UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) system: This system offers trademark owners a way to get infringing domains (like .com, .net, .org) transferred or canceled without costly court battles, relying on a three-part test: confusing similarity, no legitimate interest, and bad faith registration/use. It’s a strong remedy but a slower process, taking several weeks.
How to Choose the Best Phishing Takedown Service
The best phishing takedown services will combine measurable speed with broad channel coverage (domains, social, SMS, etc.), automated detection and monitoring services, strong relationships with the infrastructure ecosystem, and comprehensive evidence collection.
Beyond technology implementation considerations, costs, and support, here’s your checklist for evaluating the right phishing takedown service for your organization:
Speed and Efficiency
Takedown Speed: What is their mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to block (MTTB), and mean time to first and last outage?
Closure rate: What percentage of confirmed malicious assets do they successfully remove/suspend?
Ongoing Support and Automation: How does the solution work once the papers are signed, not only during POC or sales process?
Coverage and Detection
Threat Landscape: Do they cover a wide range of attack types, such as phishing, smishing, social media scams, brand impersonation, etc.?
Detection Scope: What data sets do they pull from to detect threats? Do they span across DNS data, global threat reports, and a cybercrime community?
Channel Coverage: What channels do they monitor for malicious content? Do they monitor social media, forums, dark web, app stores, etc.?
Geographic Reach:
Global Detection: Do they offer global detection and multilingual support?
Geo-fenced Detection: Are they able to detect malicious content that is geo-fenced in one region?
Relationships and Reputation:
Platform Recommendations: Can they put you in touch with referrals? Do they recommend reaching out for recommendations from your network?
Proven Track Record: Do they have proven success in your industry?Strong Relationships: Do they have existing relationships with the infrastructure community to support fast, efficient takedowns?
Evidence Collection & Reporting
Evidence: Are they able to capture and provide quality evidence for enforcement?
Reporting: Do they provide detailed reports on infringements, takedowns, etc.?
Continuous Monitoring: Do they provide monitoring after attacks are taken down? What is the process if malicious content returns?
Who Offers the Best Phishing Takedown Service?
There are a number of phishing takedown services that consistently show up on top lists for consideration. Netcraft is widely recognized as one of the most trusted brand protection and phishing takedown providers in the industry. Netcraft has delivered phishing protection and credential theft takedowns for more than 21 years, safeguarding brands and customers with proven results.
We use a combination of advanced threat intelligence, AI-powered monitoring, human analyst validation, automated workflows, and 20+ years of registrar/host relationships to detect, block, and takedown attacks. And, we do this across a wide range of phishing and scam threats, including credential theft, fake login pages, deceptive brand impersonations, phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) attacks, and social engineering lures.
If you’re looking for a strong partner to protect your brand and prevent harm to your customers, talk to us today.
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