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Memcyco Fraud & ATO Glossary

We stop customers falling for digital impersonation scams, so you can focus on taking the fight to fraudsters.

Account Takeover

Account Takeover is a cyberattack where attackers gain control of a user’s account using stolen credentials.

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Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM)

What Is Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM)? An Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) attack is a phishing-based technique in which an attacker positions a malicious proxy between a user and a legitimate website, allowing credentials and authentication tokens to be captured and relayed in real time. Unlike traditional phishing, AiTM attacks do not rely on harvesting credentials for later use. Instead, […]

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Authorized Push Payment (APP) Fraud

What Is Authorized Push Payment (APP) Fraud? Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud is a scam in which a victim is manipulated into authorizing a payment themselves, typically through impersonation and social engineering. The transaction is executed using valid credentials, normal authentication, and explicit customer approval. APP fraud is difficult to prevent because the payment appears […]

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Brand Protection

What is brand protection? Brand protection is the process of safeguarding a company’s identity from misuse or impersonation.

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Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)? Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a security approach focused on continuously identifying, prioritizing, and reducing exposure across an organization’s digital environment. CTEM aims to move security teams away from periodic assessments toward ongoing awareness of where risk exists. Rather than treating exposure as a static inventory problem, […]

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Credential Harvesting

What Is Credential Harvesting? Credential harvesting is a technique in which attackers trick users into submitting login credentials, such as usernames, passwords, or authentication tokens, through fraudulent or impersonated interfaces. It most commonly occurs through phishing sites, cloned login pages, or proxy-based portals that mimic legitimate services. Credential harvesting is a primary method used to […]

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Credential Stuffing

Credential stuffing is an automated attack using stolen username-password pairs to access accounts.

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Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)

What Is Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)? Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the practice of collecting, analyzing, and operationalizing intelligence about active cyber threats to help organizations understand attacker behavior, reduce exposure, and respond more effectively to ongoing risk. CTI focuses on identifying who is attacking, how attacks are conducted, and how threat activity evolves over […]

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Decoy Credentials

What Are Decoy Credentials? Decoy credentials are intentionally fabricated authentication credentials designed to appear legitimate but function solely as monitored detection artifacts.They are not tied to real user accounts and do not grant meaningful access. Instead, they are instrumented to generate high-confidence alerts if harvested, reused, or replayed. Decoy credentials are commonly used in deception-based […]

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Deepfake Scam

A deepfake scam uses AI-generated media to impersonate real individuals.

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Device Fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting creates a unique ID based on a user’s device and browser characteristics.

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Digital Impersonation

Digital impersonation is when attackers copy a brand’s online presence to deceive users.

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Digital Risk Protection

What Is Digital Risk Protection? Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is a cybersecurity category focused on identifying, monitoring, and mitigating external threats that target an organization’s brand, users, and digital presence outside the traditional network perimeter. These threats include phishing sites, brand impersonation, lookalike domains, leaked credentials, malicious ads, and other scam infrastructure designed to deceive […]

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Domain Takedown

What Is Domain Takedown? Domain takedown is the process of identifying and removing malicious or infringing domains from the internet. It is commonly used to address phishing sites, brand impersonation domains, scam landing pages, and other unauthorized uses of a company’s brand or digital assets. Takedowns are typically initiated by submitting abuse or infringement requests […]

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Evil Twin Attack

An Evil Twin attack uses a rogue Wi-Fi network that pretends to be legitimate.

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Fraud Detection

Fraud detection is the process of identifying suspicious or unauthorized activity.

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Genuine Site

What Is a Genuine Site? A genuine site is the legitimate, authorized website or digital service operated by an organization or individual. It is the authentic destination that users intend to access when interacting with a brand, service, or online account. In cybersecurity and fraud contexts, the term “genuine site” is used to distinguish legitimate […]

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Honeypot

What Is a Honeypot? A honeypot is a security mechanism designed to deliberately attract attackers by presenting a realistic but controlled target. It is used to observe malicious behavior, gather intelligence, and prevent attackers from interacting with real systems or data. Honeypots are intentionally made to appear valuable or vulnerable, while remaining isolated from production […]

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Honeytokening

What Is Honeytokening? Honeytokening is a deception-based security technique in which intentionally fabricated but realistic data artifacts, known as honeytokens, are placed within systems to detect unauthorized access or misuse. A honeytoken is not a legitimate credential or asset. It is a monitored decoy designed to generate a detection signal if accessed, retrieved, exfiltrated, or […]

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Impersonation Attack

What Is an Impersonation Attack? An impersonation attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker pretends to be a trusted individual, organization, or service in order to deceive a target. The goal is to manipulate trust and influence user behavior, such as sharing sensitive information, approving actions, transferring funds, or accessing malicious resources. […]

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Kill Chain

What Is a Kill Chain? A kill chain is a model that breaks down an attack into sequential stages to show how a threat progresses from setup to full exploitation. The original Cyber Kill Chain developed by Lockheed Martin describes seven stages used to characterize broad cyber intrusion activity. In digital fraud and account takeover […]

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Lookalike Domain

A lookalike domain is a fake web address that resembles a real one.

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Low Reputation Referral

What Is Low Reputation Referral? Low Reputation Referral (LRR) is a risk signal indicating that a user arrived at a legitimate website from a domain with poor, suspicious, or previously flagged reputation, often associated with phishing, impersonation, or scam infrastructure. LRR does not describe an attack technique. It describes contextual evidence that a user may […]

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Man‑in‑the‑Middle (MitM)

A MitM attack is when a third party intercepts communications between two endpoints.

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Mean Time to Detection (MTTD)

What Is Mean Time to Detection (MTTD)? Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) is a security metric that measures the average time it takes an organization to identify a security threat or incident after it begins. MTTD reflects how quickly an organization becomes aware that an attack, compromise, or malicious activity is underway. A lower MTTD […]

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Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

MFA is a security method requiring more than one form of identity verification.

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Phishing

Phishing is a scam where attackers pose as legitimate entities to steal personal or financial information.

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Poison Pill

What Is a Poison Pill? A poison pill in cybersecurity is an active deception technique in which traceable or intentionally altered authentication artifacts are injected into an attack flow so that, if harvested and reused by attackers, they generate high-confidence detection signals and prevent successful account access. Poison pills are a form of active honeytokening. […]

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Preemptive Cybersecurity

What Is Preemptive Cybersecurity? Preemptive cybersecurity refers to security strategies designed to detect and disrupt attacks before they cause harm. Unlike reactive approaches, which respond to incidents after they occur, preemptive models seek to identify early-stage threat activity such as phishing redirects, suspicious devices, or credential theft attempts before a compromise is completed. This approach […]

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Remote Access Fraud

What Is Remote Access Fraud? Remote access fraud is a scam-based attack in which threat actors manipulate victims into granting remote access to their device or active session, allowing attackers to observe activity, harvest credentials, or guide actions in real time. These attacks rely on digital impersonation and trust abuse rather than technical exploitation. Remote […]

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Remote Desktop Takeover

What Is Remote Desktop Takeover? Remote desktop takeover is a scam-based attack in which threat actors manipulate victims into granting remote desktop access to their device or active session, allowing attackers to observe activity, harvest credentials, or guide user actions in real time. These attacks rely on digital impersonation and trust abuse rather than technical […]

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Reverse Proxy Phishing

Reverse proxy phishing relays user data through a fake site to the real one.

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SEO Poisoning

SEO poisoning manipulates search engine rankings to promote malicious sites.

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Smishing

Smishing is a form of phishing delivered via SMS messages.

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Social Engineering

Social engineering is a manipulation tactic used to trick people into giving up sensitive information.

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Spear Phishing

What Is Spear Phishing? Spear phishing is a targeted phishing attack where threat actors impersonate a trusted brand, organization, or service to deceive a specific individual or group into revealing credentials, approving access, or taking harmful action. Unlike broad phishing campaigns, spear phishing relies on personalization, context, and timing to increase credibility and success. These […]

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Typosquatting

Typosquatting is registering domain names with common misspellings of real websites.

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Website Spoofing

Website spoofing is the creation of a fake site that closely mimics a real one.

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Window of Exposure

What Is the Window of Exposure? The Window of Exposure (WoE) is the period during which a company and its customers are vulnerable to harm from a phishing or digital impersonation attack. It begins when a fake or impersonating website goes live and ends only when the risk created by that site and any harvested […]

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Zero Trust

What is Zero Trust? Zero Trust is a cybersecurity framework built on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” It assumes every user, device, and session could be compromised, and requires continuous validation of trust at every stage of access, regardless of location or credentials. While Zero Trust originated in enterprise network security, it now […]