If your business has any kind of digital presence in 2025, odds are high that cybercriminals have you in their sights. One of the most common tactics? Typosquatting, which is registering lookalike domains that impersonate your brand to launch phishing scams, steal credentials, or sell counterfeit products. These sites often appear and disappear quickly, making takedown efforts feel like an endless game of catch-up.
In fact, in the first half of 2024, over 38,000 new phishing sites were launched each day, indicating a substantial rise in phishing activities.
So how do you actually take down a malicious website? The manual takedown process is still time-consuming, complex, and often frustrating, especially if you’re dealing with multiple domains across various geographies.
But if you’re determined to do it yourself, here’s what it takes. Just remember: each takedown is a one-off, so these steps need to be repeated for every site.
5 Steps to Manually Takedown a Malicious Website
If you’re committed to handling takedowns in-house, it’s important to understand that even a single site takedown can be a slow, manual process. And if you’re dealing with multiple domains, it’s exponentially harder, with each one requiring its own investigation, evidence gathering, and follow-up.
Below are the core steps typically involved in manually taking down a malicious site. These haven’t changed much over the years, but the volume and complexity of threats have.
Step 1: Discover the Malicious Site
Step one might seem straightforward, but it’s arguably the most difficult part of the entire takedown process. In today’s environment, threat actors use automation to spin up dozens or even hundreds of typosquat domains, often making detection feel like searching for a digital needle in a haystack.
This is why proactive domain risk monitoring is no longer optional. An effective program continuously scans new domain registrations, detects impersonation attempts, and flags suspicious activity before damage is done. Without this, many fake sites won’t be found until they’re already live and deceiving users.
Whether discovered through threat intel feeds, brand monitoring, customer reports, or while actively under attack, you’ll need the URL or URLs of the malicious domain(s) as your starting point for investigation.
Step 2: Safely Inspect the URL
Once you’ve identified a suspicious URL, your next move is verification—but safety comes first. Never visit the site directly in a browser, as this could expose your system or network to risk.
Instead, use a threat intelligence or phishing detection tool to safely analyze the site. Bolster’s free CheckPhish service, for example, offers a fast, automated verdict on whether a domain is malicious. You’ll receive:
- A visual screenshot of the site
- Phishing or scam classification
- Hosting provider and IP address details
- Geo-location
- Domain age and registrar data
This detailed evidence forms the backbone of your website takedown request. It’s what helps you make a strong case to hosting providers, registrars, or abuse contacts that the domain is fraudulent and deserves removal.
Step 3: Report abuse, submit evidence
Once you’ve built your evidence package, it’s time to act. Start by identifying the abuse contact—typically listed in your CheckPhish scan or available through a WHOIS lookup. This contact could be the hosting provider, registrar, or domain reseller responsible for the malicious site.
When contacting the abuse team, include as much detail as possible to support your domain takedown request:
- The full URL of the malicious domain
- Screenshots from your scan (especially login fields or fake checkout pages)
- Any observed logo misuse or brand impersonation
- Hosting and registrar information
- Passive DNS data
- Evidence of phishing kits, redirections, or malware payloads
Make it easy for the recipient to validate your claim. The stronger and more structured your report, the faster the response, and the higher the chance of a successful takedown.
Step 4: Wait… and Follow Up
Once your takedown request is submitted, patience is key. Some abuse desks respond quickly, especially if the evidence is clear and the hosting provider has a strong anti-abuse policy. Others? Not so much.
While responses can come in a matter of hours, it’s more common to wait several days to a couple of weeks, depending on the provider, region, and clarity of evidence.
During this phase, persistent and professional follow-up is your best friend. Keep records of all outreach, escalate to additional contacts if available, and be prepared to repackage or re-explain your evidence. If you’re dealing with multiple sites, consider using a tracker to stay organized and avoid duplicate efforts.
Step 5: Monitor for Reappearance
A takedown isn’t the finish line—it’s just one battle in a longer war. Threat actors will often spin up a new version of the site under a slightly altered domain, a different TLD, or on a new hosting platform within hours or days.
That’s why continuous monitoring is essential. Treat every takedown as a signal – not just a victory – and stay on alert for variations or clones of the original threat. Tools like Bolster’s automated domain monitoring can detect these copycat domains in real time and initiate takedown workflows without starting from scratch.
Without a monitoring strategy, you’re stuck playing digital whack-a-mole, and losing ground every time you pause.
Step 6: Repeat (and Scale If You Can)
If you’ve found one malicious domain impersonating your brand, chances are high there are many more—either already active or waiting in the wings. The harsh truth: cybercriminals don’t just create one lookalike site. They create batches of them, across multiple TLDs and hosting providers, to maximize reach and delay response.
That means the manual takedown process isn’t just time-consuming, but unsustainable at scale. For every domain you shut down, others are being registered and deployed.
If you’re still managing takedowns manually, repeat Steps 1–5 for each new site. But if volume is increasing or you’re struggling to keep up, it may be time to consider automation or managed services like Bolster, which can detect and takedown threats at internet speed (no repetition required).
When Things Get Tricky: Why Manual Takedowns Break Down
Even if you follow the takedown steps perfectly, the reality is that things can (and often do) get complicated, especially as the volume of threats grows or the sites become more sophisticated.
One common roadblock? Brand infringement and counterfeit operations. These types of sites often fly under the radar and require more than just a basic abuse report. Legal involvement is frequently necessary, such as cease-and-desist letters, trademark documentation, and even court orders in extreme cases. These add complexity, time, and cost to the process.
Another challenge is geo-specific enforcement. Some hosting providers and registrars in less-regulated regions may delay or ignore abuse reports altogether. In these situations, you’ll need to understand regional laws or work through localized anti-abuse networks, which is rarely feasible for lean security teams.
All things said, manual takedowns are rarely one-size-fits-all. When things get tricky, automation and expert support become critical to keep your brand protected without draining your internal resources.
What to Do When No One Responds
Sometimes, even with solid evidence, you’ll hit a wall, especially if the hosting provider is slow to act or completely unresponsive. In those cases, your next move is to escalate the issue to the domain registrar, who has authority to suspend or transfer the domain.
If registrar escalation doesn’t work, you may consider legal options like:
UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy): Effective in cases of clear cybersquatting, but costly and time-consuming. UDRP decisions are binding but require arbitration and legal filings.
DMCA Takedown Notices: Useful for U.S.-based hosts in copyright cases (e.g., logo misuse, content copying). These require a formal legal statement, including a good-faith claim of infringement and proof of original ownership. Outside the U.S., DMCA enforcement is inconsistent.
The Right Way to Handle Website Takedowns
At this point, you’ve seen what it takes to run a manual website takedown: research, evidence collection, outreach, waiting, escalation—and repetition. It can work, but it’s far from efficient. And for organizations facing high volumes of phishing, impersonation, or counterfeit activity, it’s simply not sustainable.
That’s why we recommend a smarter, more scalable path: automated domain monitoring and takedown.
Bolster’s AI-powered platform continuously scans the internet for typosquatting, phishing pages, and brand abuse, flagging threats in real time and launching automated takedown workflows without you lifting a finger.
Instead of fighting scams site by site, Bolster empowers you to defend your brand at scale.
Want to see how it works? Request a demo today.
