What Scammers do Weeks Before Targeting you. (a quick intro for business owners)
When someone plans to impersonate your brand, the preparation usually starts long before any phishing email or invoice scam appears. Attacker setups often begin quietly with one of the earliest steps: registering look-alike domains.
These domains may sit dormant or get slowly built into convincing copies of your brand. This phase is almost always invisible to the business being targeted, but it’s where the campaign actually begins.
So how do you defend against something you can’t see?
There are early steps you or your IT team can take. They don’t require deep security expertise, but they do require the right systems and a little consistency.
Step 1: Monitor for look-alike domains.
Tools like DNS Twister can help you quickly see which domains resemble yours, and whether they’re harmless, coincidental, or potentially preparing for impersonation. Our free checker gives you a fast snapshot; our deeper scan monitors more variations.
Step 2: Review what you find.
Check whether any of these domains are active. Do they have a website? Does anything resemble your branding, login pages, or customer workflows? If nothing is there yet, keep it on your radar, many malicious domains sit idle before being used.
Step 3: If something looks suspicious, take action.
This may mean reporting the domain, escalating to your security/legal team, or beginning a takedown process. Early detection gives you a window to act before the campaign moves forward.
