DMARC can’t see this: Where brand impersonation hides in plain sight

It starts with a message that looks legitimate—a social media post from your CEO, a direct message from your brand account, or a promotion shared with your customers. There’s no spoofed domain, no malicious attachment, and nothing for traditional email security controls to inspect. Yet within hours, customers are engaging, trust is being exploited, and damage is already underway. This is the new reality of brand impersonation—one that exists entirely outside the visibility of controls like DMARC.

Email security has undergone significant evolution, with controls such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM now widely deployed to combat domain spoofing and phishing. For many organisations, this creates a sense of confidence—if not comfort—that brand impersonation risks are being effectively managed. However, attackers have adapted. Increasingly, they are shifting away from traditional email-based attacks and exploiting a growing blind spot: social media and digital platforms where identity can be mimicked without the constraints of domain authentication.

This session, DMARC Can’t See This: The Rise of Social Media Impersonation Attacks, explores how threat actors are leveraging social platforms to impersonate brands, executives, and trusted entities at scale. These attacks bypass traditional email security controls entirely, enabling fraud, misinformation, and reputational damage with little technical barrier to entry.

Attendees will gain insight into how these impersonation campaigns operate in practice—from fake executive profiles and cloned brand accounts to coordinated scams targeting customers and partners. We will examine why existing security frameworks often fail to account for this attack vector, and how the decentralised, user-driven nature of social platforms creates both opportunity for attackers and challenges for defenders.

The session will also highlight the real-world impact of these threats, including financial loss, erosion of customer trust, and brand damage that extends beyond the reach of traditional security teams. As organisations invest heavily in securing email and infrastructure, adversaries are increasingly targeting the human layer—where trust is more easily manipulated and controls are less mature.

Importantly, this session moves beyond problem identification to provide practical guidance. We will explore strategies for extending security visibility beyond email, including monitoring for impersonation across social platforms, integrating brand protection into security operations, and establishing processes for rapid detection and response. Attendees will also learn how to align cross-functional teams—including security, marketing, legal, and communications—to address this evolving threat landscape effectively.

Designed for security leaders, practitioners, and risk owners, this session challenges the assumption that email security alone is sufficient to protect organisational identity. It reframes brand impersonation as a broader security issue—one that requires new thinking, expanded visibility, and a more holistic approach to defence.Participants will leave with a clear understanding of where current controls fall short, why attackers are shifting tactics, and how to begin closing this critical gap before it is exploited.