Maintaining a strong brand is one of the most important aspects of running a successful company....
Brand impersonation occurs over various communications channels. Email (phishing) and text messaging (smishing) come to mind, but voice-based attacks (vishing) chafe at a more vulnerable audience in a more visceral way. That’s why vishing is the most engaging and exploitable method employed by bad actors, usually in conjunction with unwanted robocall campaigns. Vishing isn’t reserved for the elderly, the impaired, or the most desperate among us either. Bad actors that impersonate brands pose a major threat to both the enterprise and its customers — even consumers in general — with identity or credit card theft among their main goals.
In this article, we cover:
- The growing threat of brand impersonation.
- How authentic brand communications are weakened.
- The characteristics of a strong brand impersonation vishing defense.
Consider that nearly all organizations (96 percent, to be exact) were targeted by an email-related phishing attempt. As a result, ransomware attacks are on the rise, having surged 14 percent year over year with 64 percent of companies giving in to pay the ransom. Why are companies targeted? Because in the end, corporations are manned by humans — regular people who are vulnerable when their fears and aspirations are cleverly exploited. It’s no wonder 63 percent of security professionals reported a rise in phishing attacks targeting employees. Brand impersonation has accounted for more than half of all losses from cybercrime to the tune of nearly $2 billion in the United States alone. Considering 4 billion robocalls were placed in May 2022, a 1.2 percent increase month over month, and that 30 percent (or roughly 1.2 billion) of those robocalls were classified as “scam” calls, it’s easy to see why bad actors see the voice communications landscape as ripe with opportunity.
What Is An Enterprise To Do?
Businesses must look to brand reputation management tools to monitor their brand on social media, chat sites, and other online media. Such tools should be highly automated and include human and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify consumer perceptions. Only by employing this level of sophistication over a wide swath of communications can a brand begin to detect trends and respond to misperceptions.
Specific to voice-based communications, brand impersonation occurs when a bad actor (typically using robocall technology) misrepresents a brand name during a telephone conversation as part of a scheme to gain customer trust and commit fraud. For example, an agent or voicebot might claim to be a representative of a recognized enterprise or organization in order to gain access to the customer’s account.
A brand impersonation vishing defense identifies and stops brand impersonation over the voice channel, thus authenticating its legitimate communications and messaging. A proper defense should draw upon a network of sensors to identify brand imposters and capture evidential proof that can be used to inform authorities to stop their campaigns, as well as prevent future recurrence.
YouMail Protective Services provides this exact kind of brand impersonation defense to authenticate brand and messaging. Ours is the only solution that the USTelecom Industry Traceback Group (ITG) relies on to perform the tracebacks necessary to discontinue unwanted robocalls and remove bad actors at the source of brand impersonation. Our network consists of more than 10 million sensors that identify brand imposters and collect evidential audio proof that halts bad actor robocall campaigns.
To authenticate an enterprise’s communications and messaging, YouMail Protective Services insulates companies from the adverse impacts of unwanted robocalls including unauthorized brand name usage over the voice channel. Our services detect and eliminate imposter traffic to protect a brand’s image, defend its reputation, and secure customer relationships. Our patented technology provides zero-hour identification of unwanted robocalls by leveraging the power of our robocall mitigation program for communication service providers and vendors, as well as our widely adopted robocall blocking consumer app that protects over 350 million phone numbers, answers more than 10 billion calls, and stops more than one billion robocalls.
If your enterprise needs to reduce risk from vishing impersonation, preempt bad press, save IT resources (by outsourcing to subject matter experts), and identify a trusted partner with years of experience and millions of data points, look no further than YouMail Protective Services. Let’s authenticate your communications by uncovering every threat. Schedule a demo today.
