Brand impersonation is a common tactic in nearly 51% of phishing attempts carried out via browsers.

According to reports, nearly 1 million new phishing sites are created each month, representing a 700% increase since 2020.

In 2025, the U.S. alone lost $12.5 billion to fraud, due to impersonation scams that exploited trust in brands like Microsoft, which received 68 million emails classified as malicious.

In this blog, we cover the essentials of brand monitoring, from its basic definition to the tools you need to strengthen your digital perimeter against these growing threats.

How Mitigata Protects Your Brand

Mitigata employs a multi-step approach to protect your brand from online threats:

Threat Hunting: We actively monitor both existing and potential threats to your brand’s online presence, identifying risks early to prevent future infringements.

Data Collection and Threat Handoff: Our team collects critical data from online monitoring activities and passes it to your company for further action. We ensure that all potential risks are identified and documented.

Direct Takedown Action: Mitigata establishes direct connections with platforms to initiate takedowns swiftly. Our team works quickly to remove harmful content from the internet, protecting your brand’s image.

Brand Protection at Its Core: Our first line of defence is continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection.

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What Is Brand Monitoring in Cyber Security?

Brand monitoring is the systematic tracking of brand mentions, properties, and digital personas across online platforms to detect misuse, impersonation, or fraud.

A brand monitoring system tracks not only domains but also social media, marketplaces, the dark web, mobile apps, and advertising sites to identify where attackers exploit brands by name or logo.

How Brand Monitoring Services Function

Brand monitoring services use a combination of automated scanning, threat intelligence feeds, and expert analysis. The whole process consists of:

Asset Discovery

Brand monitoring services identify and map company-related assets, including official websites, social media accounts, mobile applications, and trademarks. This establishes a reference point for future detection activities.

Continuous Data Collection

The online brand monitoring services conduct thorough searches across search engines, social media platforms, ad networks, app stores, forums, and underground sources, among others. One of the most important parts of this whole process is social media monitoring, which includes mentions of the brand.

Threat Detection

The brand monitoring software notifies the user about the appearance of unusual activity like typo-squatted domains, fake sponsored ads, impersonation profiles, or phishing websites.

Explore how to pick dark web monitoring software that gives visibility into underground threats targeting your brand and data.

Risk Analysis

Brand monitoring services apply context scoring to gauge the effect depending on the size of the audience, the intention behind the action, and the exposure area. All this information helps in deciding which case to take up first.

Takedown and Response

Brand protection services involve the coordination of takedown actions for counterfeit domains, fraudulent ads, and impersonating websites. A lot of brand monitoring services assist in legal and platform-based removal workflows.

Reporting and Alerts

These tools provide security and legal departments with a unified dashboard, with real-time alerts and detailed reports.

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Key Features to Look for in the Best Brand Monitoring Software

Choosing the right brand monitoring software requires attention to features that support speed, accuracy, and coordinated response.

Attack Surface Management

Attack Surface Management involves continuously scanning and mapping your organisation’s entire digital footprint, including websites, apps, and third-party integrations, to pinpoint vulnerabilities like exposed APIs or misconfigurations.

This proactive approach prioritises risks based on exploitability, enabling teams to patch or mitigate threats before attackers strike, reducing breach likelihood by up to 70% in monitored environments.

Get a comprehensive guide to attack-surface monitoring, with key practices for identifying and reducing exposure across digital assets

Executive Monitoring

Executive Monitoring tracks online mentions and profiles of C-suite leaders across social media, forums, and the dark web to detect deepfake videos, fake accounts, or doxxing attempts that could lead to social engineering attacks.

By alerting to impersonations in real-time, it prevents spear-phishing campaigns targeting executives, who are involved in 22% of successful breaches.

Real-Time Threat Detection

The best brand monitoring tool provides real-time alerts for the appearance of phishing domains, fake websites, fraudulent advertisements, and attempts of identity misuse.

The instant notifications allow the security teams to act before the customers are affected.

Takedown and Neutralisation

Takedown and Neutralisation services use automated workflows to report and remove malicious assets, such as phishing domains registered via unauthorised apps, often within hours of detection.

Broad Channel Coverage

Brand monitoring software for large organisations must search the digital landscape across a wide range of channels. The range should consist of websites, social media, advertising networks, app stores, and dark web sources.

This broad visibility helps reveal threats that are often present across multiple platforms simultaneously.

Automated Takedown Support

The integrated takedown workflows allow for the speedy removal of malicious content.

Brand monitoring security improves response time by synchronising domain suspension, ad deletion, and profile takedown processes directly with service providers and hosting platforms.

Risk Scoring and Prioritisation

The best brand monitoring tools categorise the threats by level of severity using threat type, exposure, and possible impact as the main criteria.

This ranking assists the teams in directing their efforts towards high-risk situations like active phishing campaigns or massive impersonation attempts.

Brand Monitoring That Never Sleeps

Continuous monitoring, fast onboarding, and expert response ensure your brand stays protected everywhere online.

Custom Keyword and Asset Tracking

Online reputation monitoring tools must have the ability to create their own tracking rules.

This includes the brand name, product name, leader identity, domain variations, slogan, and regional spelling.

Custom tracking decreases false alarms and enhances detection precision.

Analytics and Reporting

The brand monitoring platforms should provide a dashboard that is easy to understand and shows the trends, the number of threats, the takedown status, and historical insights.

The reports should serve not only the security teams who are managing incidents but also the leadership who are reviewing the brand’s risk exposure.

Learn how dark web data exposure happens and what businesses can do to detect and respond to it.

Compliance and Audit Support

An effective brand monitoring system supports audit preparedness by providing logs of incidents, response timelines, and evidence records.

These reports are helpful for meeting cyber insurance requirements and for regulatory reviews.

How to Choose the Right Brand Monitoring Software

Here is an expert guide on selecting the best brand monitoring software:

Identify Risk Exposure

Impersonation and phishing are the biggest drivers of brand abuse, especially in industries like finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and SaaS.

Because of this, organisations in these sectors need comprehensive brand protection monitoring. This should include threat detection and takedown support to respond quickly to abuse.

On the other hand, smaller organisations can implement online brand monitoring services centred on their major channels and subsequently expand.

Estimate Coverage

The brand monitoring software should check social media platforms, domains, advertising networks, app stores, and even the dark web sources.

When the coverage is limited, there is an increased likelihood of missed threats, especially in cases where the attackers are operating across several platforms.

Evaluate Response Abilities

When comparing the best brand monitoring tools, response time must be considered.

It shall encompass alert delivery time, takedown execution, and access to security analysts who will assess threats and manage escalation.

Review top network security tools with insights on capabilities that help detect and prevent threats at the network level.

Discuss Integration Possibilities

Brand monitoring systems perform at their best when they are linked to the already established security systems. The integration with SIEM, SOC workflows, and ticketing tools enhances incident tracking and response coordination.

Evaluate Price and Scalability

Brand monitoring tools should be in line with the present needs while at the same time being able to accommodate the future expansion of the business.

Opt for the small business plans of brand monitoring tools that offer flexibility, or enterprise-grade platforms that are designed for global coverage and high data volumes.

Monitor More, Pay Less.

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Conclusion

Today, brand monitoring services are directly involved in a company’s security, customer trust, and business continuity.

Current brand monitoring systems reduce the business’s online vulnerability.

Contact Mitigata now for a free demo and secure your brand across every digital channel.

How to Choose a Brand Monitoring Tool