E-Business
How to Protect a Company’s Reputation from Illegal Use of Brand Name on the Web
When a brand becomes well known, it can be exploited by cybercriminals. They can hide behind the brand name in order to promote some dubious quality goods and services, or they can prey on the brand’s clients, partners, or employees.
The latter – including the information security department – often don’t know of the existence of malicious brand clones until their actions lead to a stream of emails to customer support, or a scandal on social networks. Such incidents negatively affect the brand’s reputation. Three types of Internet-doppelgangers are the most common.
Fake apps in stores
Today almost every business has its own app for convenient customer access to online services – sometimes more than one. When a user searches for an app in an online store they get more than one result.
While most users will download the most popular option (which usually is the authentic one), it’s likely that some will fall for the scammers’ trick and install a fake app – especially if they receive a direct link to it.
Such a malicious app can hide anything – from a banking Trojan to a remote access tool to the user’s mobile device. Kaspersky experts recently found several modified versions of popular instant-messenger apps on Google Play containing spyware code.
Fake social media accounts
Social media accounts posing as relating to a certain brand can be used by criminals in a variety of different schemes.
They are often used to spread false information – to promote some semi-legal (online casinos) or outright fraudulent activities (giveaways for all kinds of prizes, tickets or bitcoins) supposedly affiliated with a certain corporate brand.
However, a fake account can also distribute malicious or phishing links, or serve as a platform for more sophisticated social engineering attacks.
Phishing sites
If a company’s website has a member area for clients, partners or employees, the personal credentials to these accounts are of interest to attackers. At some point attackers will try to imitate such a website in order to harvest logins and passwords – at least in order to resell this information to other cybercriminals.
How to protect a company’s reputation from copy-cats?
In the vast majority of cases, the illegal schemes involving imitation of a website, an app, or a social media account are targeted at someone else (individuals or business users).
However, it’s the reputation of the brand that is being maliciously imitated that suffers. Therefore, such brand twins should be identified and eliminated before they cause significant damage.
To share our expertise on this matter and help companies to timely detect their brand twins we’ve updated Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence service.
Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence is designed to enable customers to monitor their digital footprint and identify potential risks and vulnerabilities associated with it. Some time ago, its functionality was supplemented with monitoring for phishing sites that use brand names or were registered using typosquatting and combosquatting, as well as with a domain takedown service.
Transcorp Hotels Plc has delivered a stellar performance in the first half of 2025, recording a 60% year-on-year surge in revenue to ₦47.57 billion, up from ₦29.72 billion in H1 2024. Gross profit climbed 71% to ₦36.21 billion, maintaining a strong 76% margin despite inflation and operational headwinds.
The hospitality giant, a subsidiary of Transnational Corporation Plc, also announced an interim dividend payout of ₦1.024 billion — offering ₦0.10 per 50 kobo ordinary share to shareholders.
In a bold move, the company unveiled Nigeria’s largest corporate venue — the 5,000-seat Transcorp Centre — staking its claim as the new leader in event hospitality. Chairman Emmanuel Nnorom described the results as proof of Transcorp Hotels’ transformative strategies and unwavering investor commitment. MD/CEO Uzo Oshogwe attributed the success to relentless execution and a resilient business model.
Transcorp Hotels, renowned for iconic assets like Transcorp Hilton Abuja and its digital platform Aura, says it isn’t just leading Nigeria’s hospitality sector — it’s redefining excellence across Africa.
Chinese “threat actors” have hacked Microsoft’s SharePoint document software servers and targeted the data of the businesses using it, the firm has said.
China state-backed Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as well as China-based Storm-2603 were said to have “exploited vulnerabilities” in on-premises SharePoint servers, the kind used by firms, but not in its cloud-based service.
The US tech giant has released security updates in response and has advised all on-premises SharePoint server customers to install them.
“Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are still ongoing,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The firm said it had “high confidence” the hackers would continue to target systems which have not installed its security updates.
It added that it would update its website blog with more information as its investigation continues.
Microsoft said it had observed attacks in which hackers had sent a request to a SharePoint server “enabling the theft of the key material by threat actors”.
Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting firm, a division of Google Cloud, told reporter, it was “aware of several victims in several different sectors across a number of global geographies”.
Carmakal said it appeared that governments and businesses that use SharePoint on their sites were the primary target.
A number of adversaries who stole material encoded by cryptography were then able to regain ongoing access to the victims’ SharePoint data, he said.
“This was exploited in a very broad way, very opportunistically before a patch was made available. That’s why this is significant,” Carmakal said.
Carmakal said the “China-nexus actor” was deploying techniques similar to previous campaigns associated with Beijing.
Microsoft said Linen Typhoon had “focused on stealing intellectual property, primarily targeting organizations related to government, defence, strategic planning, and human rights” for 13 years.
It added that Violet Typhoon had been “dedicated to espionage”, primarily targeting former government and military staff, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, higher education, the media, the financial sector and the health sector in the US, Europe, and East Asia.
Meanwhile, Storm-2603 was “assessed with medium confidence to be a China-based threat actor”.
National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has issued a public warning that it is not associated with NINcard.com.
According to the commission, the website has been circulating online to offer services for Nigerians seeking National Identification Number (NIN) services.
NIMC, in a post on its official X account on Wednesday, said, “NINcard.com is not in anyway affiliated to NIMC. Stay vigilant!”
The warning was accompanied by screenshots of fake payment receipts and OTP request pages from the website, both of which were boldly stamped “FAKE” by NIMC to alert the public.
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