The most damaging cyberattack on a brand may never touch its network, trigger its firewall, or appear in its endpoint logs. It may begin instead with a lookalike domain, a fake mobile app, a cloned executive profile, or a phishing page designed to exploit the very trust a business has spent years building. Seqrite, the enterprise security arm of Quick Heal Technologies Limited, today warned that brand impersonation has become one of the fastest-growing and least visible threat categories confronting Indian organisations, with customers, partners and employees increasingly bearing the financial and reputational cost of attacks launched entirely outside the traditional perimeter.
Researchers at Seqrite Labs, India’s largest malware analysis facility, revealed that the country witnessed a surge of over 300% in brand impersonation attacks between 2024 and 2025, transforming what was once a narrow email-spoofing problem into a multi-channel fraud ecosystem involving lookalike domains, fake mobile apps, fraudulent executive identities across social platforms, and stolen employee credentials traded on dark web forums. Seqrite noted that attackers are now pairing these tactics with AI-generated content, pixel-perfect website cloning and highly tailored social engineering, making fraudulent communications increasingly indistinguishable from legitimate brand interactions.
One recent example cited by Seqrite researchers involved a customer of a mid-sized private bank in Pune who received a message requesting verification of net banking credentials following a “routine security update.” The sender domain – firstindiabnk.in – was close enough to the genuine brand to evade suspicion, and the communication’s visual identity mirrored the bank’s official correspondence. Within four hours of entering credentials and an OTP, the customer lost ₹1.8 lakh, and investigators later found that the malicious domain had been registered just three weeks earlier and had already enabled fraud against 17 customers before the first complaint surfaced.
According to researchers at Seqrite Labs, these incidents reflect a structural gap in enterprise security strategy. Traditional tools such as firewalls, antivirus, EDR, and XDR are designed to protect assets inside the environment. Brand impersonation attacks, however, unfold entirely outside that boundary – on malicious domains hosted overseas, fraudulent social profiles, counterfeit apps, and dark web marketplaces selling stolen access. As a result, by the time an enterprise hears of the incident, the fraud has often already succeeded and customer trust has already been damaged.
This threat pattern aligns closely with findings from Seqrite’s India Cyber Threat Report 2026, which recorded 265.52 million detections across more than 8 million endpoints in India between October 2024 and September 2025, averaging 505 detections every minute. The report also found that Trojans and file infectors accounted for nearly 70% of all attacks, while behaviour-based engines blocked over 34 million advanced threats, underscoring how cybercrime in India is becoming both more automated and more deceptive. While these numbers reflect internal telemetry, the more serious blind spot for many organisations now lies beyond the endpoint, in the unmanaged digital terrain where impersonation, phishing, exposed credentials and brand abuse take shape long before they become visible to internal defenses.
The implications extend beyond fraud losses. Brand impersonation campaigns can drive business email compromise, misinformation, account takeover, customer attrition, regulatory scrutiny, and legal exposure, especially in sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, education and consumer platforms where trust is a core business asset. In India, these risks now intersect directly with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, particularly when impersonation-based scams harvest customer credentials, personally identifiable information, or sensitive data under the guise of legitimate communication.
In this environment, Seqrite Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS) has become a must-have layer of defense for enterprises. Seqrite DRPS continuously monitors the open web, dark web forums, domain registrations, social platforms and mobile app ecosystems to detect lookalike domains, fake websites, impersonated executive profiles, credential leaks and malicious brand abuse before they are fully weaponised. It also supports rapid takedown of malicious assets through engagement with registrars, hosting providers and digital platforms, significantly shrinking the fraud window and reducing reputational fallout. Seqrite also offers a Digital Risks Calculator, which enables organizations to assess their potential exposure across digital assets, identify areas of elevated risk, and prioritize mitigation efforts.
Seqrite Data Privacy is equally critical in this threat landscape because impersonation attacks are rarely only about brand misuse; they are about data theft, identity abuse and unauthorised access. Seqrite Data Privacy helps organisations discover, classify and protect sensitive customer, employee and business data across hybrid environments, strengthening governance and breach readiness in the face of phishing-led exfiltration and fraud-driven data exposure. Together, Seqrite DRPS and Seqrite Data Privacy give organisations visibility across both the external threat surface and the internal data layer that attackers ultimately seek to compromise.
All Seqrite products and services are compliant with the provisions of the DPDP Act, enabling organisations to strengthen cyber defense, data governance and regulatory readiness through an integrated approach rather than isolated controls. Supported by Seqrite’s wider enterprise portfolio, including endpoint and server security, threat intelligence and ransomware recovery as a service, this approach is designed to help organisations move from reactive incident handling to proactive digital trust protection.
