Threat Glossary
Domain Abuse
Domain abuse is the registration or use of internet domains that exploit a brand's name - typosquats, lookalike domains, and copycat extensions - to divert traffic, run scams, send fraudulent email, or host impersonating content.
Last reviewed: September 2026
TL;DR
- Typosquats and lookalikes catch your customers one keystroke from the real site.
- Abusive domains power phishing email that appears to come from you.
- New registrations can be detected the day they appear.
- Registrar and UDRP channels resolve abuse when evidence is in order.
The Business Impact
Diverted traffic
→Misspelled visits land on someone else's page - or someone else's scam.
Phishing enablement
→Lookalike domains make fraudulent email indistinguishable from yours.
Customer harm
→Every scam run on a lookalike domain is attributed to your brand.
Escalating cost
→Squatted domains get more expensive to recover the longer they operate.
Why It Matters
Domains are infrastructure - whoever holds a convincing lookalike holds a piece of your identity. Most brands discover domain abuse only after customers report being scammed, when the cheap moment to act was the week the domain was registered.
How DiReFTY Helps
The Outcome
Your name points where you decide - abusive domains caught at registration, not after the scam reports.
Related
FAQs
Domain Abuse questions
A quick overview of how monitoring, assessment, and enforcement work. If you need more detail, talk to the team directly.
What is domain abuse?
- Domain abuse is the registration or use of internet domains that exploit a brand's name - typosquats, lookalike domains, and copycat extensions - to divert traffic, run scams, send fraudulent email, or host impersonating content.
How does domain abuse damage a business?
- Domains are infrastructure - whoever holds a convincing lookalike holds a piece of your identity. Most brands discover domain abuse only after customers report being scammed, when the cheap moment to act was the week the domain was registered.
How does DiReFTY protect against domain abuse?
- Monitoring of new domain registrations resembling your brand and products.
- Threat assessment - live phishing and clones versus parked speculation.
- Response coordination through registrars, hosts, and dispute channels.
- Your name points where you decide - abusive domains caught at registration, not after the scam reports.
What is typosquatting and how do I protect my brand from it?
- Typosquatting is registering a domain that is one mistake away from a real brand's domain - a swapped or missing letter, an extra hyphen, or a different extension such as .co instead of .com - to catch visitors who mistype it. Those domains are then used for phishing, ads, fake shops, or resale to the brand.
- Protection has three parts: register the most obvious variants of your own domain, monitor new registrations that resemble your name so you see them the day they appear, and act early through the registrar or a dispute process while the domain is still cheap to recover.
Someone registered a domain similar to my brand. What can I do?
- Check what the domain is doing first. If it hosts phishing, a fake shop, or impersonating content, report it to the hosting provider and registrar abuse desks (found through a WHOIS or RDAP lookup) and to Google Safe Browsing - that can disable it within days.
- If it is parked or held for sale, the route is ownership: a UDRP complaint for .com and most generic extensions, or INDRP through NIXI for .in domains. Both require showing the domain is confusingly similar to your mark, the holder has no legitimate interest, and it was registered and used in bad faith.
What is cybersquatting in India?
- Cybersquatting is registering a domain containing someone else's brand or trademark in bad faith, usually to sell it back, divert traffic, or impersonate the brand. Brands usually respond through domain dispute processes rather than courts.
- In practice, .in cybersquatting is usually resolved through the INDRP dispute process run by NIXI, and generic domains such as .com through UDRP, which are usually faster and cheaper than going to court.
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