Information Warfare & Influence Operations

Hostile actors register domains that closely mimic your brand to run disinformation campaigns, impersonate executives, or spread false narratives to clients, partners, and the press. This form of information warfare can destabilise investor confidence, damage client relationships, and erode years of brand equity in a matter of days.

What We Do

• Continuous monitoring of newly registered domains mimicking your brand
• Early-warning alerts for lookalike domain activations (websites, mail servers, social profiles)
• Threat intelligence on coordinated campaigns leveraging your namespace
• Takedown assistance and legal referral for abusive registrations
• Defensive acquisition of high-risk lookalike domains before adversaries can

Industrial Espionage — Patents & Commercial Intelligence

Competitors and state-sponsored actors use confusable domain names to intercept commercial communications, redirect partner inquiries, and harvest confidential data exchanged over email. Patent filings, M&A discussions, and contract negotiations are prime targets. A single misdirected email can expose IP worth millions.

Threat Vectors

• Lookalike domains used to harvest credentials or redirect file-sharing links
• Man-in-the-middle positioning via confusable names at key suppliers or law firms
• Passive monitoring of email traffic sent to similar domains by internal staff
• Domain-based brand impersonation targeting your IP transfer chain

Our Response

• Namespace risk mapping across TLDs and Unicode homographs
• Identification of domains already parked or mail-enabled near your brand
• Defensive registration strategy for commercial-critical naming assets
• Coordination with your legal team on UDRP or national IP enforcement

Business Email Misdelivery Risk

Employees routinely mistype domain names when forwarding sensitive documents, copying external partners, or auto-completing recipient addresses from memory. A misdelivered email containing a contract, financial model, or personal data record can constitute a regulatory breach — and an intelligence windfall for whoever controls the receiving domain.

Common Scenarios

• One-character typos: acme-corp.com vs acmecorp.com
• TLD confusion: .com vs .co, .net, or ccTLDs
• Hyphen insertion or omission in compound brand names
• Plural or abbreviated variants that resolve to third-party mailboxes

Mitigation

• Audit of your current domain portfolio versus the full misdelivery risk surface
• Priority acquisition of highest-risk confusable variants
• Policy redirect or null-route configuration to contain misdirected traffic
• Staff awareness programme on email hygiene and address verification

Domain Similarity Risk

Typosquatting, homograph attacks, and combosquatting transform minor visual differences into credible impersonation channels. Attackers register domains that look identical or near-identical to yours — using Punycode characters, swapped letters, or added keywords — then deploy them for phishing, credential harvesting, or fraudulent invoicing.

Attack Categories We Monitor

• Typosquatting: transpositions, missing or doubled characters
• Homograph / IDN attacks: Unicode characters visually indistinguishable from ASCII (e.g. Cyrillic а vs Latin a)
• Combosquatting: your brand combined with terms like -secure, -login, -invoice, -support
• Soundsquatting: phonetic equivalents that bypass visual checks
• Bitsquatting: single-bit character errors exploiting hardware-level noise

Our Approach

• Algorithmic generation of your full confusable domain surface across all active TLDs
• Continuous WHOIS and zone-file monitoring for new registrations
• Prioritised risk scoring based on MX record activity, hosting, and content analysis
• Actionable remediation: acquire, block, monitor, or escalate to enforcement

Catch-All Email — Intercepting Sensitive Leaks

Any domain with a catch-all mail configuration receives every email sent to any address at that domain — including messages misaddressed to non-existent mailboxes. An adversary controlling a domain similar to yours and running catch-all can passively collect contracts, legal notices, investor communications, and HR records for months without triggering any alerts on your side.

Why This Is a Critical Risk

• No active attack is required — misdelivery alone creates the leak
• Leakage is silent: senders receive no bounce, unaware the mail was intercepted
• Catch-all operators can harvest email threads, attachments, and metadata at scale
• GDPR and data-protection regulators may treat systematic misdelivery as a reportable breach

How We Help

• Identification of domains in your similarity surface that are catch-all enabled
• Assessment of the volume and sensitivity of email likely misdelivered to those domains
• Controlled acquisition of the highest-risk catching domains to bring them under your control
• Ongoing monitoring for new catch-all configurations in your namespace
• Forensic review and incident response support if a past leak is suspected

How to Engage

We offer domain security assessments as a standalone service or as part of a broader brand protection mandate. Typical engagements include:

1. Initial namespace risk audit — delivered within 5 business days
2. Continuous monitoring subscription — monthly threat digest + immediate critical alerts
3. Defensive acquisition programme — prioritised domain capture on your behalf
4. Incident response — rapid investigation when a suspicious domain is detected

Contact us to discuss your exposure: info@alternic.com