RESOURCE
Website Managed Takedown Service or DIY?
5 Questions To Ask Yourself
Combatting brand impersonation attacks and protecting your users’ sensitive information requires locating and removing phishing sites, rogue mobile apps, and spoofed social media accounts from the internet. Organizations that take this threat seriously have two options: handle takedowns internally with their IT or network security team, or hire a takedown service such as Allure Security’s or those offered by other brand protection vendors.
In weighing the pros and cons of each approach, think about it as you would a car repair or home improvement project. Do you have the time? Do you have the skills? Are specialized tools required and do you know how to use them? What are the potential costs if you make a mistake?
When it comes to takedowns of online impersonations of your brand, should you do-it-yourself or hire an expert? Ask yourself these five questions to find out.
When It’s Time to Hire a Takedown Service
Does Your Team Have the Skills?
Sure, most people feel comfortable replacing their car’s windshield wipers or replacing the knobs or drawer pulls in their kitchen. But what about installing a new bathroom outlet or replacing a head gasket on your vehicle?
First, determine whether your internal team is up to the job.
Speed plays a critical role in takedowns, fraud prevention, and brand protection. How fast can your team gather the necessary information, send takedown requests, follow-up on or expedite requests, and secure confirmation of the takedown? Research into the typical lifecycle of an online scam shows that nearly all victims fall prey (i.e., get tricked into revealing credentials, personal information, or credit card information) within the first 24 hours. Catching and taking down scams early – before they reach potential victims – actually prevents harm.
On its face, the takedown process isn’t especially complicated. However, takedown experts can employ a range of strategies to accelerate responses from social media platforms, hosting providers, and other service providers. For example, Allure Security has spent years building trusted relationships with providers across the online content ecosystem. This ensures responses to our requests and faster and more effective takedowns. Compare the quality of skills on your team against what can be accessed through a paid service.
If you’re considering building in-house expertise, think about the costs of recruiting, training, and retaining skilled personnel. In most cases, partnering with a managed brand protection service is far more efficient and cost-effective.
Does Your Team Have the Time?
Back to our analogy, maybe you can change your oil or hang drywall. However, with work responsibilities, family time, and personal interests – what’s the best use of your time? Time with loved ones might be the better investment of your energy. The time and effort in doing it yourself might not justify the cost savings when a professional can do it quicker and more efficiently. The same logic applies to takedowns. Managing them internally can drain resources put to better use elsewhere.
While a lone IT director with a full workload can likely execute a single takedown, how much time do they need to sacrifice tracking and following-up on requests, time that leaves their brand and users exposed? And if impersonation volume climbs, it can quickly overwhelm even larger, dedicated security teams.
Time is also a finite resource. Each hour spent sending or tracking takedown requests has an opportunity cost. It’s an hour that can’t go toward improving network services, completing new IT projects, and supporting business goals.
Any single takedown can have a clear beginning and end, but online brand protection requires constant vigilance. When you successfully take down a fake site, the same fraudster can generate a new spoof website using the same fraudulent content and a slightly different domain. To protect your brand online, the team must perform continuous monitoring of the web to catch emerging threats in real time.
Does Your Team Have the Tools?
Continuing with our comparison, say your hardwood floor needs refinishing. Do you own a floor sander? Do you feel comfortable operating one without risking further damage? Or, imagine you need to fix your car’s brakes. You might know how to replace brake pads, but, what if the brake calipers are the issue? Do you own a wind-back tool or a brake bleeder kit?
Similarly you might assume a takedown only requires an email account to contact an abuse team. But if you aspire to get ahead of scams – finding and removing them before your users encounter or report them – you’ll need specialized tools. Do you have systems in place to safely access scam sites and collect the evidence needed for takedown requests? Do you have the software necessary to navigate the dark web safely and effectively to uncover phishing kits and other scam tools for sale that target your brand?
Without these tools, scams can go undetected, giving you a false sense of security. What seems like low impersonation volume may be due to missed impersonations across the web, social media, or mobile app stores. Ensuring your team has the right tools may require additional cybersecurity investments. Weigh these costs carefully against the price of third-party services (and think about whether your team has the skills and time to operate them).
What Are the Legal or Regulatory Hurdles?
Using our hypothetical again: thinking about expanding your kitchen or adding a deck to your home’s exterior? Depending on your local jurisdiction, you might need a permit. Want to install a custom exhaust system on your car? Depending on where you live, you’ll need to make sure its emissions comply with legal limits.
Takedowns may involve regulatory and legal complications. Stolen or impersonated content may be copyrighted, a registered trademark, or other intellectual property. You may need to invoke these protections as part of the takedown process. You’ll have to ensure your internal team understands these legal protections and their implications.
Second, you may need to contend with cross-border issues. A brand impersonation attack originating in another country may not be subject to the same intellectual property protections, and the domain registrar may not be under the same obligations as one based in the U.S. Does your team have the expertise to navigate this complexity and successfully remove websites hosted outside the U.S.?
Final Question:
What Are the
Risks
of Making a Mistake?
Whether working on your home or a car, if the risk includes serious injury or worse, you should seek out an expert. While the stakes aren’t quite life-or-death for online brand impersonation, minutes matter.
When attacks go undetected or the takedown team can’t persuade a service provider to take action, the consequences are clear: customers defrauded, brand reputation tarnished, and trust eroded.
Brand impersonation attacks undermine core aspects of a company’s success from financial performance, to customer acquisition, to overall business resilience. The fallout can include customer churn, reduced marketing ROI, and long-term damage to the brand. According to a 2023 Edelman survey, respondents were 59% more likely to purchase new products from brands they trust, and 67% said they were more likely to stay loyal to a trusted brand. Trust ranked as one of the top three buying considerations.
As more commerce shifts to digital processes, the value of a company’s online brand only continues to grow. In 2023, brand impersonation reached a tipping point. The FTC reported in its annual Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book that nearly half of the fraud reported to the federal government qualified as impersonation fraud. Approximately 160,000 brand impersonation scams were reported in 2023, resulting in $10 billion in financial damages. Those harrowing statistics don’t even begin to account for unreported fraud.
When assessing whether the team has the necessary skills, tools, and time to handle these challenges, you are ultimately evaluating the risk of failure. How confident are you in their ability to prevent brand impersonation attacks? And how will you respond when an attack slips through?
Takedown in Practice
Two Stories of Website Takedown Services
Below are two customer stories of the website takedown process in action. These Allure Security case studies demonstrate the takedown process and reveal the difference between in-house efforts and a website takedown service.
Southern U.S. Credit Union
At a glance:
- Local credit union uncovered a website spoof targeting their members
- Attempted the takedown process with the internal security team
- Over a week went by with no response
- Allure Security online brand protection identified the same website and removed it in less than a day
A credit union based in the southern United States supports nearly 28,000 members from their headquarters in Virginia. When the credit union encountered a fake website featuring their brand and targeting their members, they attempted a website takedown with their internal security team.
The team submitted a takedown request to the domain registrar hoping it would be quickly removed. It was unclear how long the spoofed website was live before being discovered, and over a week later, it was just as unclear when the registrar would take action.
At the same time, the credit union learned of Allure Security and its domain/website protection solution. Sure enough, Allure Security located the fake website and confirmed it was still live, awaiting takedown. Within a day, the Allure Security website takedown service succeeded, and the website was removed. What had become weeks without a response was resolved in a single day.
“Now I don't worry about [online brand protection]. It's happening in the background. For the most part, it's set it and forget it. Which is very good.”
DIAMOND BANK
At a glance:
- Community bank received alerts from their customers that they are being targeted by brand impersonation attacks
- The bank completed a takedown process with the internal team
- The attack was reported by customers and the team was concerned about how many more were out there
- Allure Security located and eliminated 28 other instances of malicious websites
Diamond Bank is a community bank with 14 branches and thousands of customers in the Southwest Arkansas region. The bank celebrated its 120th anniversary in 2024 and takes great pride in its longevity and connection to the community.
From their customers, they began hearing of brand impersonation text and email messages with links to spoofed websites featuring the Diamond Bank brand. These instances demanded a takedown effort, but protecting their brand proved more difficult than they expected.
The fact that their customers had reported these phishing attacks posed a troubling implication. How many spoofed sites go unreported? Where are the emerging threats? These were questions they had no means of answering without a website takedown service.
Since deploying Allure Security web and social media protection services, the team has executed 28 takedown campaigns of website, mobile app, or social media spoofs of Diamond Bank’s brand. Allure Security’s determined team of takedown specialists proved a much faster and more comprehensive method than the original, manual takedown process.
“Most every website [spoof] was taken down in less than a day.”
What You Should Do Next
Both the Southern U.S. Credit Union and Diamond Bank stories are also available as standalone case studies. Get the full story about how website takedown services proved more effective than internal efforts.
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