Brandjacking

What Is Brandjacking?

Brandjacking is the unauthorised use of a company's or person’s brand, reputation, or digital assets to deceive users, commit fraud, or conduct cyberattacks. This often involves fake websites, social media accounts, ads, emails, or domains that imitate a trusted brand.

Brandjacking can damage customer trust, harm a brand's reputation, and lead to financial losses for both organisations and their stakeholders. While most security teams focus on protecting their internal networks, brandjacking attacks bypass traditional defences by exploiting something that exists entirely outside your security perimeter: your brand's reputation and identity.

Why That Matters

Brandjacking can have serious consequences for organisations or people who rely on digital channels to engage with their audience. Fraudulent social media accounts, fake communities, impersonated brand chats, and unauthorised messaging campaigns can quickly mislead users and damage trust in a matter of hours.

It can include:

• Financial losses
• Decrease in customer trust
• Reputational damage
• Legal and compliance risks
• Increased phishing, impersonation, and social engineering campaigns
• Reduced effectiveness of official marketing, customer support, and community engagement efforts.

How Brandjacking Works

Brandjacking typically begins when attackers create fraudulent digital assets that appear legitimate, such as fake social media profiles, messaging accounts, online communities, branded chat experiences, websites, or advertising campaigns.

Unsuspecting users encounter these assets through social platforms, search engines, messaging apps, ads, or shared links. Believing they are interacting with the genuine brand or person, they may disclose personal information, share credentials, make payments, or just engage with the wrong party.

As fraudulent activity spreads, the organisation or individual may experience reputational harm, customer complaints, loss of trust, and operational disruptions, even if the brand was not directly responsible for the attack.

Real-World Examples of Brandjacking

Binance has repeatedly warned users about brand impersonation campaigns on Telegram and other messaging channels. Attackers create fake Binance support accounts, community profiles, and customer service representatives to distribute phishing links, collect personal information, or steal cryptocurrency assets from users. Binance regularly publishes guidance on identifying and reporting impersonation attempts.

Microsoft is frequently targeted by brandjackers involving fake support websites, phishing emails, and impersonated IT support personnel. In recent years, attackers have increasingly abused Microsoft Teams and support-related communications to pose as trusted Microsoft representatives, convincing victims to grant remote access or disclose sensitive information. Microsoft and security researchers regularly publish warnings about these impersonation techniques.

How Organisations Can Prevent Brandjacking

1. Monitor domain registrations
2. Track social media impersonation
3. Deploy Digital Risk Protection (DRP)
4. Educate users and employees
5. Implement takedown processes
6. Monitor app stores and marketplaces
7. Keep communications internally—when criminals can create a fraud account on social media or messengers, it is impossible to fake the activity and brand representatives inside the main app.

How Watchers Protect Clients from Brandjacking

Watchers employs advanced security and moderation mechanisms to prevent brandjacking and brand impersonation. The platform uses domain whitelisting for chat interactions, supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), and protects the userID through encryption and secure authentication controls. These measures help prevent unauthorised duplication of brand chats and chat accounts of users.

From the in-chat point of view, our moderation system protects your brand and also users from brainjacking inside the chat: users cannot. All users have encrypted IDs, regular users can’t use brand names, titles and nicknames due to the strong premoderation system. 

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Read the Watchers article about moderation approaches