Impersonation

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Impersonation is a social engineering attack where an attacker pretends to be someone they are not.

• two approaches:
  • persuasion/consensus/liking
    • convince the target that the request is a natural one that would be impolite or somehow odd to refuse
  • coercion/threat/urgency
    • intimidate the target with a bogus appeal to authority or penalty
• often leverages Pretexting

Brand Impersonation

Brand impersonation means the threat actor commits resources to accurately duplicate a company’s logos and formatting (fonts, colors, and heading/body paragraph styles) to make a phishing message or pharming website, a visually compelling fake.

• Disinformation/misinformation tactics could be used to create fake social media posts or referrers (sites that link to the fake site) to boost search ranking