IMPERSONATION attacks succeed by borrowing trust, with attackers posing as a familiar brand, a trusted vendor, a help desk agent, or an executive whose request feels urgent. In practice, campaigns blend lookalike domains, cloned login pages, SMS follow-ups, and collaboration‑app messages to build a believable story and increase conversion rates, sometimes adding voice calls or remote support to guide targets through MFA steps in real time.
The article breaks down the top impersonation tactics, including brand impersonation using lookalike domains, business email compromise via executive impersonation, IT help desk impersonation to capture MFA codes, vendor impersonation and invoice fraud, and collaboration‑tool impersonation in Microsoft Teams and similar apps.
Real‑world figures from 2025 show the scale: phishing attacks reached 1,130,393 in Q2 2025, with 635,672 unique malicious QR codes detected in the same quarter, while the average wire‑transfer BEC amount rose to $83,099 and brand impersonation remained dominated by Microsoft, Google, and Apple. The piece notes that early signals such as lookalike domains and cloned pages can be surfaced through Brand Protection, and that takedown workflows can reduce how long malicious pages stay live.
According to APWG the trends underline how impersonation remains a pervasive, multi‑channel threat that organisations must address with layered protections.