Threat Glossary
Know what you're up against.
The digital threats that damage reputation, trust, and revenue - what each one is, what it costs a business, and how it gets stopped.
Last reviewed: July 2026
Fake Reviews
Fake reviews are fabricated or incentivised customer reviews - positive or negative - posted to distort how a business appears on Google, marketplaces, and industry review platforms.
Brand Impersonation
Brand impersonation is the unauthorised use of a business's name, logo, or identity by someone posing as that business online - through fake social accounts, cloned websites, fraudulent ads, or messaging profiles - usually to defraud customers or damage trust..
Fake Profiles
Fake profiles are social media or platform accounts that pose as a real person, executive, or organisation without authorisation - built to mislead followers, run scams, spread false statements, or harvest personal information under a trusted identity..
Counterfeit Listings
Counterfeit listings are marketplace product listings that sell imitation goods under a genuine brand's name, packaging, or product imagery - diverting sales from the real brand and exposing buyers to inferior or unsafe products..
Fake Websites
Fake websites are fraudulent sites built to look like a legitimate business - cloned storefronts, lookalike domains, and phishing pages - designed to divert traffic, capture payments, or harvest customer credentials under a trusted brand's identity..
Trademark Abuse
Trademark abuse is the unauthorised commercial use of a protected brand name, logo, or mark - in product listings, advertising, domains, apps, or search keywords - that trades on the brand's equity or confuses customers about who they are buying from..
Marketplace Violations
Marketplace violations are breaches of a brand's selling and distribution policies on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart - unauthorised sellers, grey-market inventory, listing hijacks, and pricing violations - that erode margins, pricing integrity, and buyer trust..
Search Reputation Attacks
A search reputation attack is a deliberate effort to push negative, false, or damaging content to the top of search results for a business's or person's name - using coordinated posts, hostile articles, or manipulated pages - so that damaging results are the first thing anyone researching the name sees..
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..
Review Manipulation
Review manipulation is the coordinated distortion of a business's ratings and reviews - negative review bursts, competitor-funded fake praise elsewhere, vote gaming, and abusive takedown reports against genuine reviews - engineered to move a rating faster than real customers can correct it..
Misinformation
Misinformation is false or misleading information about a business, product, or person that spreads across social platforms, forums, messaging apps, and news aggregators - whether started deliberately or by mistake - and hardens into perceived fact if it goes unanswered..
Online Defamation
Online defamation is a false statement of fact published on the internet - in posts, reviews, articles, forums, or videos - that damages the reputation of a person or business.
DPDP Non-Compliance
DPDP non-compliance is a business's failure to meet the consent, data-governance, and breach-notification obligations of India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 - the law governing how organisations collect, process, store, and protect personal data.
Understanding Digital Threats
How digital reputation threats actually work
Digital reputation threats rarely arrive as a single, obvious event. They build quietly - a handful of fake reviews here, a cloned social profile there, a lookalike domain registered months before it is ever used. Individually each one looks minor. Together they shape what customers, partners, and search engines believe about a business.
That is why detection matters more than reaction. By the time a threat is visible to the business, it has usually already reached the audience that matters. A counterfeit listing has taken a sale. An impersonation account has answered a customer. A defamatory post has ranked on the first page of search. The cost is often paid before anyone inside the company notices.
DiReFTY approaches every threat in this glossary through the same four-stage framework. Detect means continuously monitoring the channels where reputation is formed - review platforms, marketplaces, social networks, search results, and the domain space around your brand. Respond means assessing each signal for severity, credibility, and business impact, so effort goes to what genuinely threatens trust rather than noise. Enforce means coordinating the reporting, escalation, and documentation needed to get harmful content removed or corrected. Protect means reducing the chance of recurrence and strengthening long-term trust resilience.
Use this glossary to understand the specific threats your business is exposed to. Each entry explains what the threat is, the business impact it creates, and how it is stopped. If several of these feel familiar, that is usually a sign that exposure is already higher than it looks.
Which of these threats is already targeting you?
Most businesses find out after the damage. Find out now instead - free, focused, and specific to your exposure.